Part 7

After dinner we went to the church. Goethe, when he was in Assisi, saw the old Roman Temple of Minerva,--and then, that his pleasure in it might not be disturbed, refused to look at anything else in the town, and went quickly on his way. But when I passed out of the sunlight into the dark lower church and under the low rounded arches to the altar with Giotto's angels and saints above, it seemed to me he was the loser by his great love for classic beauty. Many who have been to this wonderful church have written descriptions of it, but none have really told, and indeed no one can ever tell, how wonderful it is. The upper church, with its great lofty nave and many windows through which the light streams in on the bright frescoed walls, is beautiful. But this lower one, with its dark, subdued color and dim light, and the odor of incense which always lingers in it, is like the embodiment of the mystery and love that inspired the saint in whose honor it was built. In it one understands, for the first time perhaps, what it is for which the followers of Saint Francis gave up life and action. Whoever was long under the influence of this place must, I thought, always stay,--like the old gray-haired monk we saw kneeling before a side altar rapt in contemplation. And yet on the very threshold we found three or four brothers laughing and joking with two women,--Italian Dr. Mary Walkers they must have been, for they wore men's collars and cravats and coats, with field-glasses slung over their shoulders, and stiff gray hats, and they were smoking long _sigare Cavour_. They were artists, and had been painting, oh, so badly! in the church all the morning.

The sun was setting when we left the monastery and walked through the streets, now silent and deserted, where Francis in his gay youth wandered with boon companions, singing not hymns but love-songs. A small boy came and walked with us, and, unbidden, acted as our guide. Here was the Duomo, he said, and here the Church of Santa Chiara; and, when we were on the road without the city gate, _Ecco!_ below, Santa Maria degli Angeli! For from where we stood we looked down upon the huge church rising from the plain, where even now there are scarcely more houses than in the days when Franciscans, coming from far and near to hold counsel with their founder, built their straw huts upon it. Our self-appointed guide was a bright little fellow, and never once begged like the other children who followed us. So when he showed us the road to Foligno where we must ride on the morrow, J. gave him a _sou_. At the door of the Albergo he said he must go home, but not to supper; he never had any. He asked at what time we should leave in the morning, when he would like to come and say good-by. _Felice notte_--"a happy night"--were his last words as he turned away.

VIRGIL'S COUNTRY.

"_If we have such ill speed at our first setting out, what may we expect betwixt this and our journey's end!_"

The next morning, with a select company of ragged boys, our young guide arrived in time to see us start. When I came out he nodded in a friendly way, as if to an old acquaintance, to the wonder and admiration of the other youngsters. The waiter, his glasses on, came to the gate with us. Two monks standing there asked how far we were going on our velocipede. "To Rome?" they cried. "Why, then, here are two pilgrims and two priests!" Our guide and his friend ran down the mountain-side after us until we gave the former another _sou_, when they at once disappeared. It seemed a little ungrateful; but I did not give him much thought, for just then J. bade me back-pedal with all my might. The machine went very fast, despite my hard work, and to my surprise J. suddenly steered into a stone-pile by the roadside. "The brake is broken!" was his explanation as we slowly upset.

Fortunately, however, the upright connecting the band of the brake with the handle had only slipped out of place, and though we could not fix it in again securely, J. could still manage to use it. This, so far as we could see, was the one defect in our tricycle, but defect it was. A nut on the end of the upright would have prevented such an accident. But this is one of the minor particulars in which tricycle-makers--and we have tried many--are careless. We had the rest of the coast without interruption. Half-way down, our little friend and his followers ran out from under the olives; he had taken a short cut that he might see us again.

From Assisi to Terni was a long day's ride by towns and villages, through fair valleys and over rough mountains. From the foot of the mountain at Assisi, past Monte Subasio, which, bare and rocky, towered above the lower olive-covered hills, the road was level until we rode by Spello with its old Roman gateway and ruined amphitheatre. But the hill here was not steep, and then again there came a level stretch into Foligno, the first lowland town to which we had come since we left Poggibonsi, and which, with its mass of roofs and lofty dome rising high above the city walls, looked little like the Foligno in Raphael's picture. Already in our short ride--for it is but ten miles from Assisi to Foligno--we noticed a great difference in the people. It was not only that many of the women wore bodices and long earrings, and turned their handkerchiefs up on top of their heads, but they, and the men as well, were less polite and more stupid than the Tuscans or Umbrians about Perugia.

Few spoke to us, and one woman to whom we said good-morning was so startled that she thanked us in return, as if unused to such civilities. For all J.'s shouts of _a destra_--to the right--and _Eccomi!_ they would not make room for us; and now in Foligno one woman, in her stupidity or obstinacy, walked directly in front of the machine, and when the little wheel caught her dress, through no fault of ours, cried "_Accidente voi!_"--the _voi_, instead of _le_, being a far greater insult than the wishing us an accident. Then she walked on, cursing in loud voice, down the street, by the little stream that runs through the centre of the town, and into the market-place where Saint Francis, in mistaken obedience to words heard in ecstasy, sold the cloth he had taken from his father that he might have money to rebuild the church of San Damiano.

Even the beasts we met were stupid as the people. At our coming, horses, donkeys, and oxen tried to run. We therefore looked for at least a skirmish when, beyond Foligno, a regiment of cavalry in marching order advanced upon us. But the soldiers stood our charge bravely. Only the officer was routed and retreated into the gutter. Then, forgetting military discipline, he turned his back upon his men to see us ride.

We were now on the old Via Flaminia and in the valley of the Clitumnus,--Virgil's country. The poet's smiling fields and tall, stiff oaks, his white oxen and peasants behind the plough or enjoying the cool shade, were on either side. Crossing the fields were many stony beds of streams, dry at this season, lined with oaks and chestnuts, under whose shade women were filling large baskets with acorns and leaves. The upturned earth was rich and brown. Through the trees or over them we saw the whitish-blue sky, the purple mountains, some pointed like pyramids, and the gray olive hills with little villages in their hollows, and before long Trevi on its high hill-top. And then we came to the temple of the river god Clitumnus, of which Pliny writes, and where the little river, in which Virgil says the white flocks for the sacrifice bathed, runs below, an old mill on its bank and one willow bending over it.

At the village of Le Vene, near the source of the stream, we stopped at a wine-shop to eat some bread and cheese. There was no one there but the _padrone_ and a dwarf who wore a decent suit of black clothes and had a medallion of the Pope on his watch-chain. He had come in a carriage which waited for him at the door. I think he was a drummer. He drank much wine, and spoke to us in a vile patois. Indeed, the people thereabout all spoke in dialects worse, I am sure, than any Dante heard at the mouth of Hell. The dwarf had travelled, and had been in Florence, where he had seen a velocipede, but not like ours. It was finer, or perhaps he should say more commodious. The seats were side by side, and it had an umbrella attached, and it was worked by the hands. It went, oh, so fast! and he intimated that we could not hope to rival its speed. I suppose our machine without an umbrella seemed to him like a ship without a sail. But I think he had another tale to tell when, ten minutes later, he having started before we did, we passed him on the road. We were going so fast I only had time to see that in his wonder the reins fell from his hands.

Then came the small, wretched village of San Giacomo, with its old castle built up with the houses of the poor, and then Spoleto, where we lunched in a _trattoria_ of the people which was much troubled by a plague of flies. A company of Bersaglieri, red caps on the backs of their heads and blue tassels dangling down their backs, sat at one table, ordering with much merriment their soup and meat and macaroni to be cooked _à la Bersagliere_; at another, two young men were evidently enjoying an unwonted feast; and at the table with us were three peasants, one of whom had brought his bread in his pocket: he eat his soup for dessert, and throughout the meal used his own knife in preference to the knife and fork laid at his place. Two dogs, a cat, and a hen wandered in from the piazza and dined on the bits of macaroni dropped by the not over-careful soldiers. The waiter greeted us cordially. He too had a machine, he said, but had never heard of velocipedes with three wheels. His had but two; the _Signore_ must see it. And before he would listen to our order for lunch, he showed J. his bicycle,--a bone-shaker. He was very proud of it. He had ridden as far as Terni. Ah! what a beautiful time we should have before the afternoon was over! Seven miles down the mountain!

The thought of this coast made us leave Spoleto with light hearts, though we knew that first must come a hard climb. But if the road was as perfect as it had been all the morning, there was not much to dread. It was half-past two when we started from the _trattoria_, but we were fifteen minutes in walking to the other end of the town. There was no use riding. The streets were narrow and steep, and crowded with stupid men and women and donkeys, and with officers who instead of controlling were controlled by their horses. Beyond the gate the ascent at first was gradual and we rode easily, even as we worked looking back to the famous old aqueduct and the shadowy heights of Norcia. For some distance we went by the dried-up bed of a wide stream, meeting many priests on foot and peasants on donkeys. But as the way became steeper we left the stream far below, and came into a desolate country, where the mountains were covered with scrub-oaks, and priests and peasants disappeared; only one old man kept before us, making short cuts up the mountain-side, but after a while he too rode out of sight.

We soon gave up riding. J. tied a rope to the tricycle and pulled while I pushed. The sun was now hidden behind the mountain and the way was shady. But still it was warm work and wearisome; for before long the road became almost perpendicular and was full of loose stones. How much more of this was there, we asked a woman watching swine on the hillside? "A mile," was her answer; and yet she must have known there were at least three. Finally, after what seemed hours of toiling, we asked another peasant standing in front of a lonely farm-house how much farther it still was to the top. "You are here now," she said. She at least was truthful. A few feet more, and we looked down a road as precipitous as that up which we had come, and so winding that we could see short stretches of it, like so many terraces, all the way down the mountain. We walked for about a hundred yards, and it was as hard to hold back the machine as before it had been to push it. Then we began to ride, but the strain on the brake loosened the handle a second time. We dismounted, and J. tried to push it back into place: it snapped in two pieces in his hands. Here we were, eight miles from Terni, in a lonely mountain road in the evening,--the sun had already set,--with a brakeless machine, which, if allowed to start down-hill with its heavy load of two riders and much baggage, would soon be more unmanageable than a runaway horse. The seven miles' coast to which we had looked forward for days, was to be a walk after all. Like the King of France and his twenty thousand men, we had marched up the mountain that we might march down again. Is it any wonder that we both lost our tempers, and that an accident was the smallest evil we wished the manufacturers of our tricycle? Because they cared more for lightness than for strength,--since record-making is as yet the chief end of the cycling,--the necks of people who ride for pleasure are forsooth to be risked with impunity!

However, there was nothing to do but to walk into Terni. It was very cold, and we had to put on our heavy coats. Presently the moon rose above the mountains on our left. By its light we could see the white road,--now provokingly good, but steep and winding and all unknown,--the hills that shut us in on every side, and, far below, the stream making its way through the narrow pass. The way was unpleasantly lonely and silent. Now for an hour or more we went wearily on without hearing a sound but our steady tramp; and now we passed a farm-house within which many voices were raised in anger, while from the barn a dog barked savagely upon our coming. At times we thought we saw in the distance a castle with tall towers or an old ruin, but when we drew near we found in its place great rocks and cliffs of tufa. Once we went through a small village. The way here was not so steep, and for a few minutes we rode. Just beyond the houses three men, driving home a large white bull, walked in the middle of the road. J. shouted, that they might give us more space to pass; but they only laughed, and tried to set the bull on us with loud cries of _Via!_ Before the last died away we were walking again.

On and on we walked, all the time holding back the tricycle. But at last we began to meet more people. Men with carts and donkeys went by at long intervals, but they spake never a word, and we too were silent. Now and then we heard the near tinkling of cow-bells, and came to olive-gardens, where in the moonlight the black twisted trunks took grotesque goblin shapes, and the branches threw a network of shadows across our path. Then we came to a railroad, and we knew we were at the foot of the mountains, and that Terni was not far off. We were at the end of the seven miles' coast and could ride again. Two men just then coming our way, J. asked them how far we were from the town; but they stood still and stared for answer. A second time he asked, and still they were speechless. "_Imbecile!_" he cried, and we left them there dumb and motionless. Not far beyond the road divided, and on either side were a few houses. A woman (or a fiend in female form) sat in front of one. "Which is the way to Terni?" we asked. She was silent. Once more we asked. _Chi lo sa?_--"Who knows?"--she answered. This was more than tired human nature could endure; J. turned upon her with a volley of choice Italian abuse. It conquered her as the prayers of Saint Anthony vanquished her sister demons. She arose and meekly showed us the way.

In another minute the lights of Terni were in sight. Then we wheeled by a foundry with great furnace in full blast, by a broad avenue with rows of gas-jets, to the gates of the city, to find them shut. There was a second of despair, but J. was now not to be trifled with, and he gave a yell of command which was an effectual "open-sesame." And so we rode on through lively streets and piazza to the hotel, to supper, and to bed!

TERNI AND ITS FALLS.

"_Well, keep all things so in thy mind, that they may be as a goad in thy sides to prick thee forward in the way thou must go._"

"_What thing so deserving as to turn us out of the way to see it?_"

I know little of Terni, except that in the month of October the hotel is so cold that the waiter comes into the dining-room in the morning with hat on, and wrapped in overcoat and muffler, and that there is an excellent blacksmith in the town; for the next morning, as soon as J. had had the brake mended, he paid the bill and loaded the tricycle. The _padrone_ was surprised at the shortness of our stay. Did we not know there were waterfalls, and famous ones too, but three miles distant? We could not take the time to visit them? Well, then, at least we must look at their picture; and he showed us a chromo pasted on the hotel omnibus. I am afraid he took us for sad Philistines; but the fear of another kind of waterfall was still a goad to hurry us onward. Now we were so near our journey's end, no wonder, however great, could have led us from the straight path.

IN THE LAND OF BRIGANDS.

"_But by this place Christian went without much danger, whereat I somewhat wondered_."

There was a great _festa_ that day, and all along the street and out on the country road we met men and women in holiday dress carrying baskets and bunches and wreaths of pink chrysanthemums. In Narni, on the heights which Martial called inaccessible, men were lounging in the piazza or playing cards in the _caffè_. For the shepherds alone there was no rest from every-day work. Before we reached even Narni, but ten miles across the valley from Terni, we saw several driving their sheep and goats into the broad meadows. They wore goat-skin breeches, and by that sign alone we should have known we were nearing Rome. We lunched at Narni on coffee and cakes, for it was the last town through which we should pass on that day's ride. It was here that Quintus, in its Roman prosperity, stayed so long that Martial reproached him for his wearisome delay. Could he come to it now, I doubt if his friend would have the same reason for complaint. It did not seem an attractive place, and when we asked a man about the country beyond, he said it was "_bruto_." We did not learn till afterwards that this applied to the people, and not to the country, and that here we ought to have been briganded.

We were now high up on the mountain,--on one side steep rocks, on the other a deep precipice. Far below in a narrow valley ran the little river Nar, and on the bank above it the railroad. It was not an easy road to travel, and often the hills were too steep to coast or to climb. The few farm-houses by the way were closed, for the peasants had gone to church. We saw an occasional little gray town crowning the top of sheer gray cliffs, like those in Albert Dürer's pictures, or an old castle either deserted or else with farm-house built in its ruins, where peasants leaned over the battlemented walls. But the only villages through which we rode were Otricoli, just before we descended to the valley of the Tiber, where we created so great a sensation that an old woman selling chestnuts--cooked, I think, by a previous generation--was at first too frightened to wait on us, and Borghetto, on the other side of the valley, where we saw in the piazza the stage from Cività Castellana, in which town we were to spend the night.

There were a few people abroad. In the loneliest part of the mountain an old man in a donkey-cart kept in front of us on a long upgrade. Interested in the tricycle, he forgot the donkey, which gave up a straight for a spiral course, and monopolized the road. J. angrily asked its driver which side he meant to take. But the old man heaped coals of fire on his head by offering to carry us up in his wagon. After we left him far behind, we passed two travellers resting by the wayside. Their bags lay on the ground, and they looked weary and worn. They gave us good-day, and where we were going they of course wanted to know. They too were bound for Rome, it turned out, and had come from Bologna. After the two gentlemen of Bologna, we overtook a group of merry peasants, coats slung over their shoulders for no possible reason but the sake of picturesqueness, and hats adorned with gay pompons of colored paper and tinsel. One carried branches of green leaves and red fruit like cherries, and as we went by he gave us a branch and wished us a good journey. Next went by an old woman, who said with a smile that we could go without horse or donkey,--a witticism heard so often it could no longer make us laugh. And then a little boy all alone came "piping down the valley wild."

We went with much content over the plain by the Tiber, where there were broad grassy stretches full of sheep and horses, and here and there the shepherds' gypsy-looking huts. It was such easy work now, that we eat our chestnuts as we rode; but beyond the bridge, on which Sixtus V. and Clement VIII. and Gregory XIII., in true papal fashion, have left their names, the hills began again. On we toiled, beneath shady oaks and by rocky places, until we came out on a wide upland. From the treeless road the meadows rolled far beyond to high mountains, on whose sloping side the blue smoke of charcoal-burners curled upward. The moon already had risen, and in the west the setting sun filled the sky with glowing amber light, against which the tired peasants going home were sharply silhouetted.