GRIGIA
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little side valley where the expedition was to go. When men came down
from these mountains to sell milk and buy polenta, they sometimes
brought great lumps of rock crystal or amethyst, "Shich was said to
grow as profusely in many crevices up there as in other places flowers
grow in the field, and these uncannily beautiful fairy-tale objects still
further intensified his impression that behind the outward appearance
of this district, this appearance that had the flickering remoteness and
familiarity the stars sometimes have at night, there was hidden some–
thing that he yearningly awaited. When they rode into the mountain
valley, passing Sant' Orsola at six o'clock, by a little stone bridge
across a mountain rivulet overhung with bushes there were, if not a
hundred, at least certainly a score of nightingales singing. It was broad
daylight.
When they were well in the valley, they came to a fantastic place.
It hung on the slope of a hill. The bridle path that had brought them
now began sheerly to leap from one huge flat boulder to the next,
and flowing away from it, like streams meandering downhill, were a
few short, steep lanes disappearing into the meadows. Standing on the
bridle-path, one saw only forlorn and ramshackle cottages; but if
one looked upward from the meadows below it was as though one
had been transported back into a prehistoric lake-village built on
piles, for the front of each house was supported on tall beams, and the
privies floated out to one side of them like litters on four slender
poles as tall as trees. Nor was the surrounding landscape without its
oddities. It was a more than semicircular wall of high, craggy moun–
tains sweeping down steeply into a crater in the center of which
was a smaller wooded cone, and the whole thing was like a gigantic
empty pudding mold with a little piece cut out of it by a deep-running
brook, so that there it yawned wide open against the high flank of the
slope on which the village hung. Below the snow line there were corries,
where a few deer strayed in the scrub, and in the woods crowning the
round hill in the center the blackcock were already on display. The
meadows on the sunny side were flowered with yellow, blue and white
stars, as big as thalers emptied out of a sack. But if one climbed
another hundred feet or so beyond the village, one came to a small
plateau covered with ploughed fields, meadows, hay barns and a
sprinkle of houses, with a little church, on a bastion that jutted over
the valley, gazing out over the world that on fine days lay far beyond
