"Once," continued Aunt Varvara, "I went to pick lavender near a nuraghe. I remember as if it were yesterday. I had the fever, and in the evening I had to lie down on the grass, waiting till some cart should pass which would carry me home, and this is what I saw. The heaven behind the nuraghe was all the colour of fire—it looked just like a scarlet cloth. And suddenly a giant rose on the patiu[18] and started blowing smoke out of his mouth. The whole sky became dark. By our Lady of Good Counsel, it was horrible! But quite suddenly I saw St George with the full moon on his head, and a great sword shining like water in his hand. Tiffeti! Taffeti!" cried the old dame, flourishing a kitchen knife! "St George slashed off the giant's head, and the sky became quite bright again."
"You saw all that. Aunt Varvara, because you had fever."
"It may have been the fever, but I did see the giant and Santu Jorgi; yes, I saw them with these eyes!" asseverated the old lady, poking her fingers into her organs of vision.
Then she asked whether on the days of the greater feasts, horses still galloped along the edge of the cliff, decorated with coloured ribbons and ridden by half naked boys. And again whether for Sant' Antonio they lighted fires, and in the middle of the fires stuck stakes, on top of which were roasted oranges and pomegranates and arbutus berries, and dead rats.
Anania listened with pleasure to Aunt Varvara's suggestive stories and questions. Though the trains were shrieking within a few yards and the amorous cats were miouing among the columns of the Pantheon, he so identified himself with the old woman's recollections that he fancied he had only to open the door, to find himself in a lonely Sardinian landscape on the top of a nuraghe watched by a giant, or rapt in the savage excitement of a race of Barbs, in the company of a philosophic and contemplative old shepherd with soul turbid and great like the clouds. In the homesick babble of the aged exile he already felt the aroma of his native land, the breeze blown down from Orthobene and the Gennargentu. And he felt himself Sardinian, deeply, exclusively Sardinian.
"I mean to enjoy myself this vacation!" he said to his old Mend. "I shall attend all the Feasts, I shall visit the whole of my little native country. I shall climb on the Gennargentu, on Monte Raso, on the hill of the castle of Burgos! Yes, I'm determined to get up the Gennargentu. Perhaps, at Fonni, so and so, and so and so are still alive. And I wonder how the monks are getting on? and Zuanne?"
He was homesick like Aunt Varvara.
"Aren't you ever going back?" he asked Signora Obinu one day when she came into the kitchen.
"I?" she answered rather drearily, "no, never again, never again!"
"Why not? Come to the window Signora Maria! look! What a wonderful moon! Wouldn't you like to go on pilgrimage to the Madonna di Gonare, in fine moonlight like this? on horseback, quietly, quietly through the woods, up the precipices—on—on—while you see the little church painted on the sky above you, high up—high up——"