THE rain, which had fallen in torrents during the night, had churned
into a quagmire the long highroad that wound, in a succession of
twists and turns, as though in search of some less laborious ascent,
some less abrupt slope, over the broken surface of the vast, deserted
plain.
The damage done by the storm appeared all the more depressing,
inasmuch as there were already signs, here and there, of the
disregard, not to say the contempt, shewn for the labours of those who
had planned and constructed the road in order to give their fellow-men
an easier passage over the natural obstacles of the country by means
of those bends and coils, erecting now a retaining wall, now a dyke.
The retaining walls had fallen, the dykes had been trampled down,
where short cuts had come into being. It was drizzling still
intermittently, in the pale dawn, between the icy gusts that blew over
from the west. And at every gust, over that strip of countryside that
was just beginning now to emerge from the wet blackness of a night of
storm, a long shudder seemed to run from the town, a huddled mass of
yellowish houses, standing aloft and shrouded on its height, and to
pass over hill and dale, over the plain that bristled still with
blackened stubble, to the boiling, crested sea beyond.
Rain and wind seemed a ruthless act of cruelty on the part of the sky
that overhung the desolation of those uttermost tracts of Sicily, upon
which Girgenti, amid the piteous ruins of its primeval existence, rose
a silent and awed survivor in the void of a time that would bring no
changes, in the abandonment of a misery beyond repair.
The thickset hedges of prickly pear, or of withered brambles, or of
agave, and the occasiorial crumbling walls were interrupted here and
there by a pair of tottering pillars supporting a crooked rusty gate,
or by a rude and squalid shrine which, in the motionless solitude,
watched over by the shaggy boughs of the dripping trees, instead of
comfort inspired a certain sense of terror, posted there as they were
to recall the Faith to wayfarers--for the most part field labourers
and carters--who all too often, with overt or concealed ferocity, made
it plain that they did not recall it. A wretched stray bird or two
had come, fluttering timidly with drenched wings, to perch upon them;
these kept watch and did not venture to titter so much as a note of
lamentation in the midst of such desolation.
For some time Placido Sciaralla's aged white mare had been ploughing
and splashing along this road, under the friendly encouragement of her
weary rider, who sat, his hands stiff and purple with the cold,
cowering beneath the wind and rain, in the gay uniform of a Bourbon
soldier: red breeches and a blue greatcoat.
"Courage, Titina!"
And the tassel of his fisherman's cap, his fatigue uniform, hanging
down in front, swayed from side to side, as though beating time to the
poor animal's weary trot.
Of the infrequent wayfarers who passed him by, on foot or mounted upon
sluggardly donkeys, any who did not know that Principe Don Ippolito
Laurentano, proud and unswerving in his loyalty to the late Government
of the Two Sicilies, retained on his domain of Colimbetra (to which
ever since 1860 he had banished himself in shame and disgust) a
bodyguard of five and twenty men in the Bourbon uniform, would turn
round in amazement and stop for a while to gaze at this grotesque
phantom emerging from the moist glimmer of daybreak, without knowing
what to make of him.
