An intricacy of narrow byways leads out of it in every direction. Into some of these we penetrated, and found them most curious.
The houses were enormously high, supported by flying buttresses from one roof or wall to the other across the narrow street; while the road itself (by courtesy so called) was made up of mighty cobble-stones, varied by large holes, with here and there a sudden drop of a foot or two. There was of course no apparatus of any sort for lighting up these side streets, and I could not help wondering what was the percentage of the population whose nocturnal errands in these dark, dangerous alleys gave them a contused or broken limb.
Here and there among the overleaning houses came a break of queer old stone arches, leading by some black and filthy staircase into an abode of darkness from which came the voices of dogs and children.
Our passage down these back streets, however, was a nervous and hasty one, and we took care to keep in the centre of the five or six feet of stony way, knowing by uncomfortable experience the national propensity of treating the highways as drains, and the possibility any moment of a deluge of dirty water from an upper window upon our heads.
In one street, a little wider than the others, and which boasted a row of shops, a brown monk was collecting coppers for his order in a little tin can, against which he rattled his brown rosary suggestively.
He was a very dirty, but a very polite monk, and showed withal rather a pleasant, honest face as he bowed to us, turning back his cowl to get a better stare.
The main street at its end branched off into two steep paths, one of which led to our "hotel," (!) and the other, equally steep but rather wider, brought us out, by rough stony passages, first to the barracks, large and white with an open square in front, and then, under an archway (over which is a little room once inhabited by the first Napoleon when a Corsican lieutenant), to a wide breezy common.
This common, covered with grass and corn-fields, with flying wind-mills, one or two military towers of heavy white stone, containing gunpowder, and some fortifications, is the plateau of the rocky height upon which Bonifacio is built.
Reaching the edge of the grassy plateau, we looked down the almost perpendicular chalk cliffs to a depth of several hundred feet below, where the blue water chafed and sparkled, as it worked away busily in its endless task of excavation.
Straight before us, across the straits, lay Sardinia, one or two houses showing a glitter across the nine miles of white-ribboned currents that rushed with terrific pace between us and her. Then, turning back, and wandering out again through the drawbridge, we descended the steep hill up which we had come, and watched the inhabitants, as, in the cool of sunset, they came riding in with their various burdens upon their mules.