Chapter 79

He is succeeded by a woman, who is put through the same heroic treatment, and exhibits like fortitude. And so they come; and the dentist after every operation waves the extracted trophy high in air, and jubilates as if he had won another victory, pointing to the stone statue yonder, and reminding them that this is the glorious day of St. Antonino. But this is not all that this man of science does. He has the genuine elixir d'amour, love-philters and powders which never fail in their effects. I see the bashful girls and the sheepish swains come slyly up to the side of the wagon, and exchange their hard-earned francs for the hopeful preparation. O my brown beauty, with those soft eyes and cheeks of smothered fire, you have no need of that red philter! What a simple, childlike folk! The shrewd fellow in the wagon is one of a race as old as Thebes and as new as Porkopolis; his brazen face is older than the invention of bronze, but I think he never had to do with a more credulous crowd than this. The very cunning in the face of the peasants is that of the fox; it is a sort of instinct, and not an intelligent suspicion.

This is Sunday in Sorrento, under the blue sky. These peasants, who are fooled by the mountebank and attracted by the piles of adamantine gingerbread, do not forget to crowd the church of the saint at vespers, and kneel there in humble faith, while the choir sings the Agnus Dei, and the priests drone the service. Are they so different, then, from other people? They have an idea on Capri that England is such another island, only not so pleasant; that all Englishmen are rich and constantly travel to escape the dreariness at home; and that, if they are not absolutely mad, they are all a little queer. It was a fancy prevalent in Hamlet's day. We had the English service in the Villa Nardi in the evening. There are some Englishmen staying here, of the class one finds in all the sunny spots of Europe, ennuye and growling, in search of some elixir that shall bring back youth and enjoyment. They seem divided in mind between the attractions of the equable climate of this region and the fear of the gout which lurks in the unfermented wine. One cannot be too grateful to the sturdy islanders for carrying their prayers, like their drumbeat, all round the globe; and I was much edified that night, as the reading went on, by a row of rather battered men of the world, who stood in line on one side of the room, and took their prayers with a certain British fortitude, as if they were conscious of performing a constitutional duty, and helping by the act to uphold the majesty of English institutions.

PUNTA DELLA CAMPANELLA

There is always a mild excitement about mounting donkeys in the morning here for an excursion among the hills. The warm sun pouring into the garden, the smell of oranges, the stimulating air, the general openness and freshness, promise a day of enjoyment. There is always a doubt as to who will go; generally a donkey wanting; somebody wishes to join the party at the last moment; there is no end of running up and downstairs, calling from balconies and terraces; some never ready, and some waiting below in the sun; the whole house in a tumult, drivers in a worry, and the sleepy animals now and then joining in the clatter with a vocal performance that is neither a trumpet-call nor a steam-whistle, but an indescribable noise, that begins in agony and abruptly breaks down in despair. It is difficult to get the train in motion. The lady who ordered Succarina has got a strange donkey, and Macaroni has on the wrong saddle. Succarina is a favorite, the kindest, easiest, and surest-footed of beasts,--a diminutive animal, not bigger than a Friesland sheep; old, in fact grizzly with years, and not unlike the aged, wizened little women who are so common here: for beauty in this region dries up; and these handsome Sorrento girls, if they live, and almost everybody does live, have the prospect, in their old age, of becoming mummies, with parchment skins. I have heard of climates that preserve female beauty; this embalms it, only the beauty escapes in the process. As I was saying, Succarina is little, old, and grizzly; but her head is large, and one might be contented to be as wise as she looks.

The party is at length mounted, and clatters away through the narrow streets. Donkey-riding is very good for people who think they cannot walk. It looks very much like riding, to a spectator; and it deceives the person undertaking it into an amount of exercise equal to walking. I have a great admiration for the donkey character. There never was such patience under wrong treatment, such return of devotion for injury. Their obstinacy, which is so much talked about, is only an exercise of the right of private judgment, and an intelligent exercise of it, no doubt, if we could take the donkey point of view, as so many of us are accused of doing in other things. I am certain of one thing: in any large excursion party there will be more obstinate people than obstinate donkeys; and yet the poor brutes get all the thwacks and thumps. We are bound to-day for the Punta della Campanella, the extreme point of the promontory, and ten miles away. The path lies up the steps from the new Massa carriage-road, now on the backbone of the ridge, and now in the recesses of the broken country. What an animated picture is the donkeycade, as it mounts the steeps, winding along the zigzags! Hear the little bridlebells jingling, the drivers groaning their "a-e-ugh, a-e-ugh," the riders making a merry din of laughter, and firing off a fusillade of ejaculations of delight and wonder.

The road is between high walls; round the sweep of curved terraces which rise above and below us, bearing the glistening olive; through glens and gullies; over and under arches, vine-grown,--how little we make use of the arch at home!--round sunny dells where orange orchards gleam; past shrines, little chapels perched on rocks, rude villas commanding most extensive sweeps of sea and shore. The almond trees are in full bloom, every twig a thickly-set spike of the pink and white blossoms; daisies and dandelions are out; the purple crocuses sprinkle the ground, the petals exquisitely varied on the reverse side, and the stamens of bright salmon color; the large double anemones have come forth, certain that it is spring; on the higher crags by the wayside the Mediterranean heather has shaken out its delicate flowers, which fill the air with a mild fragrance; while blue violets, sweet of scent like the English, make our path a perfumed one. And this is winter.

We have made a late start, owing to the fact that everybody is captain of the expedition, and to the Sorrento infirmity that no one is able to make up his mind about anything. It is one o'clock when we reach a high transverse ridge, and find the headlands of the peninsula rising before us, grim hills of limestone, one of them with the ruins of a convent on top, and no road apparent thither, and Capri ahead of us in the sea, the only bit of land that catches any light; for as we have journeyed the sky has thickened, the clouds of the sirocco have come up from the south; there has been first a mist, and then a fine rain; the ruins on the peak of Santa Costanza are now hid in mist. We halt for consultation. Shall we go on and brave a wetting, or ignominiously retreat? There are many opinions, but few decided ones. The drivers declare that it will be a bad time. One gentleman, with an air of decision, suggests that it is best to go on, or go back, if we do not stand here and wait. The deaf lady, from near Dublin, being appealed to, says that, perhaps, if it is more prudent, we had better go back if it is going to rain. It does rain. Waterproofs are put on, umbrellas spread, backs turned to the wind; and we look like a group of explorers under adverse circumstances, "silent on a peak in Darien," the donkeys especially downcast and dejected. Finally, as is usual in life, a, compromise prevails. We decide to continue for half an hour longer and see what the weather is. No sooner have we set forward over the brow of a hill than it grows lighter on the sea horizon in the southwest, the ruins on the peak become visible, Capri is in full sunlight. The clouds lift more and more, and still hanging overhead, but with no more rain, are like curtains gradually drawn up, opening to us a glorious vista of sunshine and promise, an illumined, sparkling, illimitable sea, and a bright foreground of slopes and picturesque rocks. Before the half hour is up, there is not one of the party who does not claim to have been the person who insisted upon going forward.

We halt for a moment to look at Capri, that enormous, irregular rock, raising its huge back out of the sea, its back broken in the middle, with the little village for a saddle. On the farther summit, above Anacapri, a precipice of two thousand feet sheer down to the water on the other side, hangs a light cloud. The east elevation, whence the playful Tiberius used to amuse his green old age by casting his prisoners eight hundred feet down into the sea, has the strong sunlight on it; and below, the row of tooth-like rocks, which are the extreme eastern point, shine in a warm glow. We descend through a village, twisting about in its crooked streets. The inhabitants, who do not see strangers every day, make free to stare at and comment on us, and even laugh at something that seems very comical in our appearance; which shows how ridiculous are the costumes of Paris and New York in some places. Stalwart girls, with only an apology for clothes, with bare legs, brown faces, and beautiful eyes, stop in their spinning, holding the distaff suspended, while they examine us at leisure. At our left, as we turn from the church and its sunny piazza, where old women sit and gabble, down the ravine, is a snug village under the mountain by the shore, with a great square medieval tower. On the right, upon rocky points, are remains of round towers, and temples perhaps.

We sweep away to the left round the base of the hill, over a difficult and stony path. Soon the last dilapidated villa is passed, the last terrace and olive-tree are left behind; and we emerge upon a wild, rocky slope, barren of vegetation, except little tufts of grass and a sort of lentil; a wide sweep of limestone strata set on edge, and crumbling in the beat of centuries, rising to a considerable height on the left. Our path descends toward the sea, still creeping round the end of the promontory. Scattered here and there over the rocks, like conies, are peasants, tending a few lean cattle, and digging grasses from the crevices. The women and children are wild in attire and manner, and set up a clamor of begging as we pass. A group of old hags begin beating a poor child as we approach, to excite our compassion for the abused little object, and draw out centimes.

Walking ahead of the procession, which gets slowly down the rugged path, I lose sight of my companions, and have the solitude, the sun on the rocks, the glistening sea, all to myself. Soon I espy a man below me sauntering down among the rocks. He sees me and moves away, a solitary figure. I say solitary; and so it is in effect, although he is leading a little boy, and calling to his dog, which runs back to bark at me. Is this the brigand of whom I have read, and is he luring me to his haunt? Probably. I follow. He throws his cloak about his shoulders, exactly as brigands do in the opera, and loiters on. At last there is the point in sight, a gray wall with blind arches. The man disappears through a narrow archway, and I follow. Within is an enormous square tower. I think it was built in Spanish days, as an outlook for Barbary pirates. A bell hung in it, which was set clanging when the white sails of the robbers appeared to the southward; and the alarm was repeated up the coast, the towers were manned, and the brown-cheeked girls flew away to the hills, I doubt not, for the touch of the sirocco was not half so much to be dreaded as the rough importunity of a Saracen lover. The bell is gone now, and no Moslem rovers are in sight. The maidens we had just passed would be safe if there were. My brigand disappears round the tower; and I follow down steps, by a white wall, and lo! a house,--a red stucco, Egyptian-looking building,--on the very edge of the rocks. The man unlocks a door and goes in. I consider this an invitation, and enter. On one side of the passage a sleeping-room, on the other a kitchen,--not sumptuous quarters; and we come then upon a pretty circular terrace; and there, in its glass case, is the lantern of the point. My brigand is a lighthouse-keeper, and welcomes me in a quiet way, glad, evidently, to see the face of a civilized being. It is very solitary, he says. I should think so. It is the end of everything. The Mediterranean waves beat with a dull thud on the worn crags below. The rocks rise up to the sky behind. There is nothing there but the sun, an occasional sail, and quiet, petrified Capri, three miles distant across the strait. It is an excellent place for a misanthrope to spend a week, and get cured. There must be a very dispiriting influence prevailing here; the keeper refused to take any money, the solitary Italian we have seen so affected.

We returned late. The young moon, lying in the lap of the old one, was superintending the brilliant sunset over Capri, as we passed the last point commanding it; and the light, fading away, left us stumbling over the rough path among the hills, darkened by the high walls. We were not sorry to emerge upon the crest above the Massa road. For there lay the sea, and the plain of Sorrento, with its darkening groves and hundreds of twinkling lights. As we went down the last descent, the bells of the town were all ringing, for it was the eve of the fete of St. Antonino.

CAPRI

"CAP, signor? Good day for Grott." Thus spoke a mariner, touching his Phrygian cap. The people here abbreviate all names. With them Massa is Mas, Meta is Met, Capri becomes Cap, the Grotta Azzurra is reduced familiarly to Grott, and they even curtail musical Sorrento into Serent.

Shall we go to Capri? Should we dare return to the great Republic, and own that we had not been into the Blue Grotto? We like to climb the steeps here, especially towards Massa, and look at Capri. I have read in some book that it used to be always visible from Sorrento. But now the promontory has risen, the Capo di Sorrento has thrust out its rocky spur with its ancient Roman masonry, and the island itself has moved so far round to the south that Sorrento, which fronts north, has lost sight of it.

We never tire of watching it, thinking that it could not be spared from the landscape. It lies only three miles from the curving end of the promontory, and is about twenty miles due south of Naples. In this atmosphere distances dwindle. The nearest land, to the northwest, is the larger island of Ischia, distant nearly as far as Naples; yet Capri has the effect of being anchored off the bay to guard the entrance. It is really a rock, three miles and a half long, rising straight out of the water, eight hundred feet high at one end, and eighteen hundred feet at the other, with a depression between. If it had been chiseled by hand and set there, it could not be more sharply defined. So precipitous are its sides of rock, that there are only two fit boat-landings, the marina on the north side, and a smaller place opposite. One of those light-haired and freckled Englishmen, whose pluck exceeds their discretion, rowed round the island alone in rough water, last summer, against the advice of the boatman, and unable to make a landing, and weary with the strife of the waves, was in considerable peril.

Sharp and clear as Capri is in outline, its contour is still most graceful and poetic. This wonderful atmosphere softens even its ruggedness, and drapes it with hues of enchanting beauty. Sometimes the haze plays fantastic tricks with it,--a cloud-cap hangs on Monte Solaro, or a mist obscures the base, and the massive summits of rock seem to float in the air, baseless fabrics of a vision that the rising wind will carry away perhaps. I know now what Homer means by "wandering islands." Shall we take a boat and sail over there, and so destroy forever another island of the imagination? The bane of travel is the destruction of illusions.

We like to talk about Capri, and to talk of going there. The Sorrento people have no end of gossip about the wild island; and, simple and primitive as they are, Capri is still more out of the world. I do not know what enchantment there is on the island; but --whoever sets foot there, they say, goes insane or dies a drunkard. I fancy the reason of this is found in the fact that the Capri girls are raving beauties. I am not sure but the monotony of being anchored off there in the bay, the monotony of rocks and precipices that goats alone can climb, the monotony of a temperature that scarcely ever, winter and summer, is below 55 or above 75 Fahrenheit indoors, might drive one into lunacy. But I incline to think it is due to the handsome Capri girls.

There are beautiful girls in Sorrento, with a beauty more than skin deep, a glowing, hidden fire, a ripeness like that of the grape and the peach which grows in the soft air and the sun. And they wither, like grapes that hang upon the stem. I have never seen a handsome, scarcely a decent-looking, old woman here. They are lank and dry, and their bones are covered with parchment. One of these brown-cheeked girls, with large, longing eyes, gives the stranger a start, now and then, when he meets her in a narrow way with a basket of oranges on her head. I hope he has the grace to go right by. Let him meditate what this vision of beauty will be like in twenty ears.

The Capri girls are famed as magnificent beauties, but they fade like their mainland sisters. The Saracens used to descend on their island, and carry them off to their harems. The English, a very adventurous people, who have no harems, have followed the Saracens. The young lords and gentlemen have a great fondness for Capri. I hear gossip enough about elopements, and not seldom marriages, with the island girls,--bright girls, with the Greek mother-wit, and surpassingly handsome; but they do not bear transportation to civilized life (any more than some of the native wines do): they accept no intellectual culture; and they lose their beauty as they grow old. What then? The young English blade, who was intoxicated by beauty into an injudicious match and might, as the proverb says, have gone insane if he could not have made it, takes to drink now, and so fulfills the other alternative. Alas! the fatal gift of beauty.

But I do not think Capri is so dangerous as it is represented. For (of course we went to Capri) neither at the marina, where a crowd of bare-legged, vociferous maidens with donkeys assailed us, nor in the village above, did I see many girls for whom and one little isle a person would forswear the world. But I can believe that they grow here. One of our donkey girls was a handsome, dark-skinned, black-eyed girl; but her little sister, a mite of a being of six years, who could scarcely step over the small stones in the road, and was forced to lead the donkey by her sister in order to establish another lien on us for buona mano, was a dirty little angel in rags, and her great soft black eyes will look somebody into the asylum or the drunkard's grave in time, I have no doubt. There was a stout, manly, handsome little fellow of five years, who established himself as the guide and friend of the tallest of our party. His hat was nearly gone; he was sadly out of repair in the rear; his short legs made the act of walking absurd; but he trudged up the hill with a certain dignity. And there was nothing mercenary about his attachment: he and his friend got upon very cordial terms: they exchanged gifts of shells and copper coin, but nothing was said about pay.

Nearly all the inhabitants, young and old, joined us in lively procession, up the winding road of three quarters of a mile, to the town. At the deep gate, entering between thick walls, we stopped to look at the sea. The crowd and clamor at our landing had been so great that we enjoyed the sight of the quiet old woman sitting here in the sun, and the few beggars almost too lazy to stretch out their hands. Within the gate is a large paved square, with the government offices and the tobacco-shop on one side, and the church opposite; between them, up a flight of broad stone steps, is the Hotel Tiberio. Our donkeys walk up them and into the hotel. The church and hotel are six hundred years old; the hotel was a villa belonging to Joanna II. of Naples. We climb to the roof of the quaint old building, and sit there to drink in the strange oriental scene. The landlord says it is like Jaffa or Jerusalem. The landlady, an Irish woman from Devonshire, says it is six francs a day. In what friendly intercourse the neighbors can sit on these flat roofs! How sightly this is, and yet how sheltered! To the east is the height where Augustus, and after him Tiberius, built palaces. To the west, up that vertical wall, by means of five hundred steps cut in the face of the rock, we go to reach the tableland of Anacapri, the primitive village of that name, hidden from view here; the medieval castle of Barbarossa, which hangs over a frightful precipice; and the height of Monte Solaro. The island is everywhere strewn with Roman ruins, and with faint traces of the Greeks.

Capri turns out not to be a barren rock. Broken and picturesque as it is, it is yet covered with vegetation. There is not a foot, one might say a point, of soil that does not bear something; and there is not a niche in the rock, where a scrap of dirt will stay, that is not made useful. The whole island is terraced. The most wonderful thing about it, after all, is its masonry. You come to think, after a time, that the island is not natural rock, but a mass of masonry. If the labor that has been expended here, only to erect platforms for the soil to rest on, had been given to our country, it would have built half a dozen Pacific railways, and cut a canal through the Isthmus.

But the Blue Grotto? Oh, yes! Is it so blue? That depends upon the time of day, the sun, the clouds, and something upon the person who enters it. It is frightfully blue to some. We bend down in our rowboat, slide into the narrow opening which is three feet high, and passing into the spacious cavern, remain there for half an hour. It is, to be sure, forty feet high, and a hundred by a hundred and fifty in extent, with an arched roof, and clear water for a floor. The water appears to be as deep as the roof is high, and is of a light, beautiful blue, in contrast with the deep blue of the bay. At the entrance the water is illuminated, and there is a pleasant, mild light within: one has there a novel subterranean sensation; but it did not remind me of anything I have seen in the "Arabian Nights." I have seen pictures of it that were much finer.

As we rowed close to the precipice in returning, I saw many similar openings, not so deep, and perhaps only sham openings; and the water-line was fretted to honeycomb by the eating waves. Beneath the water-line, and revealed here and there when the waves receded, was a line of bright red coral.

THE STORY OF FIAMMETTA