A general resemblance to German and English will have been observed in these fragments of Cimbrian, while other words will have been noticed as quite foreign to either.
There was a poor little house of refreshment beside our spreading haw, and a withered old woman came out of it and refreshed us with clear spring water, and our guides and friends with some bitter berries of the mountain, which they admitted were unpleasant to the taste, but declared were very good for the blood. When they had sufficiently improved their blood, we mounted our mules again, and set out with the journey of an hour and a quarter still between us and Fozza.
As we drew near the summit of the mountain our road grew more level, and instead of creeping along by the brinks of precipices, we began to wind through bits of meadow and pleasant valley walled in by lofty heights of rock.
Though September was bland as June at the foot of the mountain, we found its breath harsh and cold on these heights; and we remarked that though there were here and there breadths of wheat, the land was for the most part in sheep pasturage, and the grass looked poor and stinted of summer warmth. We met, at times, the shepherds, who seemed to be of Italian race, and were of the conventional type of shepherds, with regular faces, and two elaborate curls trained upon their cheeks, as shepherds are always represented in stone over the gates of villas. They bore staves, and their flocks went before them. Encountering us, they saluted us courteously, and when we had returned their greeting, they cried with one voice,—"Ah, lords! is not this a miserable country? The people are poor and the air is cold. It is an unhappy land!" And so passed on, profoundly sad; but we could not help smiling at the vehement popular desire to have the region abused. We answered cheerfully that it was a lovely country. If the air was cold, it was also pure.
We now drew in sight of Fozza, and, at the last moment, just before parting with Brick, we learned that he had passed a whole year in Venice, where he had brought milk from the main-land and sold it in the city. He declared frankly that he counted that year worth all the other years of his life, and that he would never have come back to his native heights but that his father had died, and left his mother and young brothers helpless. He was an honest soul, and I gave him two florins, which I had tacitly appointed him over and above the bargain, with something for the small Brick-bats at home, whom he presently brought to kiss our hands at the house of the Capo-gente.
The village of Fozza is built on a grassy, oblong plain on the crest of the mountain, which declines from it on three sides, and on the north rises high above it into the mists in bleaker and ruggeder acclivities. There are not more than thirty houses in the village, and I do not think it numbers more than a hundred and fifty souls, if it numbers so many. Indeed, it is one of the smallest of the Sette Communi, of which the capital, Asiago, contains some thousands of people, and lies not far from Vicenza. The poor Fozzatti had a church, however, in their village, in spite of its littleness, and they had just completed a fine new bell tower, which the Capo-gente deplored, and was proud of when I praised it. The church, like all the other edifices, was built of stone; and the village at a little distance might look like broken crags of rock, so well it consorted with the harsh, crude nature about it. Meagre meadowlands, pathetic with tufts of a certain pale-blue, tearful flower, stretched about the village and southward as far as to that wooded point which had all day been our landmark in the ascent.
Our train drew up at the humble door of the Capo-gente (in Fozza all doors are alike humble), and, leaving our mules, we entered by his wife's invitation, and seated ourselves near the welcome fire of the kitchen—welcome, though we knew that all the sunny Lombard plain below was purple with grapes and black with figs. Again came from the women here the wail of the shepherds: "Ah, lords! is it not a miserable land?" and I began to doubt whether the love which I had heard mountaineers bore to their inclement heights was not altogether fabulous. They made haste to boil us some eggs, and set them before us with some unhappy wine, and while we were eating, the Capo-gente came in.
He was a very well-mannered person, but had, of course, the bashfulness naturally resulting from lonely life at that altitude, where contact with the world must be infrequent. His fellow-citizens seemed to regard him with a kind of affectionate deference, and some of them came in to hear him talk with the strangers. He stood till we prayed him to sit down, and he presently consented to take some wine with us.
After all, however, he could not tell us much of his people which we had not heard before. A tradition existed among them, he said, that their ancestors had fled to these Alps from Marius, and that they had dwelt for a long time in the hollows and caves of the mountains, living and burying their dead in the same secret places. At what time they had been converted to Christianity he could not tell; they had, up to the beginning of the present century, had little or no intercourse with the Italian population by which they were surrounded on all sides. Formerly, they did not intermarry with that race, and it was seldom that any Cimbrian knew its language. But now intermarriage is very frequent; both Italian and Cimbrian are spoken in nearly all the families, and the Cimbrian is gradually falling into disuse. They still, however, have books of religious instruction in their ancient dialect, and until very lately the services of their church were performed in Cimbrian.
I begged the Capo to show us some of their books and he brought us two,—one a catechism for children, entitled "Dar Kloane Catechism vor z' Beloseland vortraghet in z' gaprecht von siben Komünen, un vier Halghe Gasang. 1842. Padova." The other book it grieved me to see, for it proved that I was not the only one tempted in recent times to visit these ancient people, ambitious to bear to them the relation of discoverer, as it were. A High-Dutch Columbus, from Vienna, had been before me, and I could only come in for Amerigo Vespucci's tempered glory. This German savant had dwelt a week in these lonely places, patiently compiling a dictionary of their tongue, which, when it was printed, he had sent to the Capo. I am magnanimous enough to give the name of his book, that the curious may buy it if they like. It is called "Johann Andreas Schweller's Cimbrisches Wörterbuch. Joseph Bergman. Vienna, 1855."