“And should I not appear within the hour, send Ernesto in to see what has become of me. Two honest men are a match for six such cutthroats as these. I must own, candidly, that I never beheld worse countenances and toilettes. If they won’t bring me back, I can wade through twelve inches of water. Now, my fine fellows—are you ready?”
They had lighted their candles, strapped their breeches above their knees and looked like utterly disreputable butchers, prepared for the shambles.
We were ill-at-ease about the adventure, but, dissembling this for the sake of appearances, before the brace of desperadoes who had remained outside,—it would seem to watch us—strolled to the edge of the water and sat down in the shade. The lake is a cup, two hundred feet in depth, less than two miles in circumference, with a rich setting of wooded hills. It was joined to Lacrinus in the reign of Augustus by canals, and Roman fleets lay here in a sheltered harbor, Monte Nuovo cut off this communication, traces of which can be seen in both lakes. At the upper end of Avernus are the fine ruins of a Temple of Apollo. We knew the ancient stories of noxious exhalations that killed birds while flying over it, and of other manifest horrors of the location; of gullies, infested by Cimmerian shades; of the Styx, draining its slow waters in their sevenfold circuit of hell, by an underground current from the bottom of this reservoir; of the ghostly boatman, the splash of whose oars could be heard in the breathless solitude of these accursed shores. Upon the hillsides, in the noisome depths of forests polluted by the effluvia of the waters, smoked sacrifices to Hecate.
We saw a placid sheet, mirroring the skies as purely as do Como and Windermere. The ravines were cloaked by chestnuts and laurels, and the hills upon the thither side were clothed with vineyards. A lonely place it is, with a brooding hush upon it that was not wholly imaginary. It is assuredly not unlovely, nor in the slightest degree forbidding. The only uncanny object we found was a vine at the entrance of the grotto. It had a twisting, tough stem, and leaves in shape somewhat resembling the ivy, although larger and more succulent, each marked in white with the distinct impression of a serpent. Upon no two was the image exactly the same in form or position, but the snake was there in all, partly coiled, partly trailing over the dark-green surface, clearly visible even to the scales, the head and, in some, the forked tongue. We remembered the pampered viper of the witch of Vesuvius, and wondered if the Sibylline spell had perpetuated in the leaving of this vine, the image of a favorite familiar, or cursed a hated plant with this brand. We gathered and pressed a handful of the mystic leaves from which the sinuous lines faded with the verdure into a dull brown, after some weeks.
The pair of cutthroats, removed to a barely respectful distance, whispered together as we examined our floral gains, staring at us from under black eyebrows. Traditions, known to the peasants, may have divulged the secret of the odd veining. More likely—our neighbors were objurgating Victor Emmanuel and his obedient soldiery for spoiling the honest trade of brigandage, and reminding one another how their honored ancestors would have fleeced these bold forestieri. Brigandage was a hereditary possession in those fair old times; held in high esteem by those who lived thereby, and, it was murmured, so gently rebuked by the Government that it throve, not withered under the paternal frown. It was openly asserted and generally believed that Cardinal Antonelli came of such thievish and murderous stock, although he died the richest man—save one—in Rome. The declension in Government morals on this head may have had much to do with Caput’s triumphant egress from the cave before the expiration of half the period he had named.
He reported the interior to consist of two narrow passages, ventilated from above, and two chambers hewn in the rock. Through the larger of these lay the entrance to the lower regions. No trace remains of the route. Probably it was closed by earthquakes as useless, so many other avenues to the same locality having been discovered. The smaller room—the Sibyl’s Bath—is floored with mosaic and flooded to the depth of a foot with tepid water, welling up in an adjacent nook. The walls are smoke-blackened, the air is close, the ante-chamber to Hades less imposing and more comfortless than when Ulysses passed this way, and Dido’s perfidious lover was led by the Sibyl through corridor and hall to the shadier realms underneath.
We stopped at a public house upon the Lucrine Lake, for lunch, and were served with Falernian wine of really excellent flavor, and small yellow oysters, tasting so strongly of copper as to be uneatable by us. People get to liking them after many attempts, we were informed by Roman epicures. One American gourmand, who had lived ten years in Italy, was so far denaturalized as to protest that our “natives” are gross in size and texture, and flavorless, when compared with these bilious-looking bivalves.
“Baedeker says they were celebrated in ancient times,” remarked Miss M——.
Glaucus regretted that he could not give his guests the oysters he “had hoped to procure from Britain,” yet subjoins that “they want the richness”—(the copperiness)—“of the Brundusium oyster.”
Old Baiæ is a heap of confusion and desolation that cumbers the hill overlooking the modern town. The only ruins at all suggestive of the state and luxury which were the boast of patrician Rome when Augustus reigned and Horace wrote, are the foundations and part of the walls of the Temples of Mercury and Diana. The former is around building with a domed roof open-eyed at the top, like the Pantheon. Six horrible hags, their parchment dewlaps dangling odiously, their black eyes glittering with hunger and cunning, in rags like tattered bed-quilts, here insist upon dancing the tarantella for the amusement of forestieri. They are always in the temple. They have, presumably, no other abode. In other doomed pleasant palaces than those of Babylon, the imagination takes up Isaiah’s lament:—