“Here friend!” I protested, in German, prodding the prostrate form with a foot, “who are you calling verdammter?”
Before the last word had passed my lips the man in the husks sprang to his feet with a wild shout.
“Lieber Gott!” he shrieked, clutching at my coat and dancing around me. “Lieber Gott! Du verstehst Deutsch! You are no cursed Italian! Gott sei dank! In three weeks I have heard no German.”
Even the asses were protesting before he ceased his shouting and settled down to tell his troubles. He was but another of those familiar figures, a German on his Wanderjahr, who, straying far south in the peninsula, and losing his last copper, was struggling northward again as rapidly as strength gained by a crust of bread or a few wayside berries each day permitted. One needed only to touch him to know that he was thin as a side-show skeleton. I offered him the half of a cheese I carried in a pocket, and he snatched it with the ravenous cry of a wolf and devoured it as we burrowed deep into the husks.
All night long the water dripped from my elbows and oozed out of my shoes, and a bitter mountain wind swept through the unmortared building. Morning came after little sleep, and I rose with joints so stiff that a half hour of kneading barely put them in working order. Outside a cold drizzle was falling, but the peasant grew surly, and, bidding farewell to my companion of the night, I set out along the mountain highway.
Two hours beyond the barn I came upon a miserable hamlet, paused at an even more miserable inn for a bowl of greasy water, alias soup, in which had been drowned a lump of black bread, and plodded on in the drizzle. A night and day of corn-husks had given me a rococo appearance that I only half suspected before my arrival at a mountain village late in the afternoon. It was a typical Apennine town; surrounded on all sides by splendid scenery, but itself a crowded collection of hovels where steep, narrow streets reeked with all the refuse of a common habitation of man and beast. The chief enigma of Italy is to know why ostensibly sane humans choose to house themselves in an agglomeration of stys, as near each other as they can be stacked, the outside huts jostling and crowding their neighbors, as if enviously waiting to catch them off their guard, that they may push nearer to the center of the unsavory jumble; while round about them spread great valleys and hillsides uninhabited.
Going for the water. A village north of Rome
Italy is one of the most cruelly priest-ridden countries on the globe