The Children of the King | Page 3

and you had a
jib bent for a mainsail, and your foresail close reefed and were shipping
more green water than you like to think of. Pitch dark, too, and the little
lighthouse on the cape not doing its best, as it seemed. The long line of
the Salerno lights on the weather bow. No getting there, either, and no
getting anywhere else apparently. Then you tried your luck. Amalfi
might not be blowing. It was no joke to go about just then, but you
managed it somehow, because you had half a dozen brave fellows with
you. As she came up she was near missing stays and you sang out to let
go the main halyards. The yard came down close by your head and
nearly killed you, but she paid-off all right and went over on the
starboard tack. Just under the cape the water was smooth. Just beyond it
the devil was loose with all his angels, for Amalfi was blowing its own
little hurricane on its own account from another quarter. Nothing for it
but to go about and try Salerno again. What could you do in an open
felucca with the green water running over? You did your best. Five
hours out of that pitch black night you beat up, first trying one harbour
and then the other. Amalfi gave in first, just as the waning moon rose,
and you got under the breakwater at last.
You remember that last of your many narrow escapes to-day as you
trudge up the stony mule-track through the green valleys, and it strikes
you that after all it is easier to walk from Diamante all the way to
Verbicaro, than to face a March storm in the gulf of Salerno in an open
boat on a dark night. Up you go, past that strange ruin of the great
Norman-Saracen castle standing alone on the steep little hill which
rises out of the middle of the valley, commanding the roads on the right
and the left. You have heard of the Saracens but not of the Normans.
What kind of people lived there amongst those bristling ivy-grown
towers? Thieves of course. Were they not Saracens and therefore Turks,
according to your ethnology, and therefore brigands? It is odd that the
government should have allowed them to build a castle just there.
Perhaps they were stronger than the government. You have never heard
of Count Roger, either, though you know the story of Judas Iscariot by

heart as you have heard it told many a time in Scalea. Up you go,
leaving the castle behind you, up to that square house they call the
tower on the brow of the hill. It is a lonely road, a mere sheep track
over the heights. You are over it at last, and that is Verbicaro, over
there on the other side of the great valley, perched against the mountain
side, a rough, grey mass of red-roofed houses cropping up like
red-tipped rocks out of a vast, sloping vineyard. And now there are
people on the road, slender, barefooted, brown women in dark
wine-coloured woollen skirts and scarlet cloth bodices much the worse
for wear, treading lightly under half-a-quintal weight of grapes;
well-to-do peasant men--galantuomini, they are all called in
Calabria--driving laden mules before them, their dark blue jackets flung
upon one shoulder, their white stockings remarkably white, their short
home-spun breeches far from ragged, as a rule, but their queer little
pointed hats mostly colourless and weather-beaten. Boys and girls, too,
meet you and stare at you, or overtake you at a great pace and almost
run past you, with an enquiring backward glance, each carrying
something--mostly grapes or figs. Out at last, by the little chapel, upon
what is the beginning of an inland carriage road--in a land where even
the one-wheeled wheelbarrow has never been seen. The grass grows
thick among the broken stones, and men and beasts have made a
narrow beaten track along the extreme outside edge of the precipice.
The new bridge which was standing in all its spick and span newness
when you came last year, is a ruin now, washed away by the spring
freshets. A glance tells you that the massive-looking piers were hollow,
built of one thickness of stone, shell-fashion, and filled with plain earth.
Somebody must have cheated. Nothing new in that. They are all thieves
nowadays, seeking to eat, as you say in your dialect, with a strict
simplicity which leaves nothing to the imagination. At all events this
bridge was a fraud, and the peasants clamber down a steep footpath
they have made through its ruins, and up the other side.
And now you are in the town. The streets are paved, but Verbicaro is
not Naples, not Salerno, not even