Hilaire Belloc - Premium Collection: Historical Works, Writings on Economy, Essays & Fiction. Hilaire Belloc

village grew up at this little rest and emotion. But as they got nearer the gates of the hills they began to be visibly perturbed, and they would say: 'The eighth mile! cheer up!' Then 'The ninth mile! Sanctissima Madonna! Have you seen anything moving on the heights?' But when they got to the _tenth_ milestone, which stands before the very jaws of the defile, then indeed they said with terrible emphasis, _'Ad Decimam!'_ And there was no restraining them: they would camp and entrench, or die in the venture: for they were Romans and stern fellows, and loved a good square camp and a ditch, and sentries and a clear moon, and plenty of sharp stakes, and all the panoply of war. That is the origin of Decimo.

      For all my early start, the intolerable heat had again taken the ascendant before I had fairly entered the plain. Then, it being yet but morning, I entered from the north the town of Lucca, which is the neatest, the regularest, the exactest, the most fly-in-amber little town in the world, with its uncrowded streets, its absurd fortifications, and its contented silent houses--all like a family at ease and at rest under its high sun. It is as sharp and trim as its own map, and that map is as clear as a geometrical problem. Everything in Lucca is good.

      I went with a short shadow, creeping when I could on the eastern side of the street to save the sunlight; then I came to the main square, and immediately on my left was the Albergo di Something-or-other, a fine great hotel, but most unfortunately right facing the blazing sky. I had to stop outside it to count my money. I counted it wrong and entered. There I saw the master, who talked French.

      'Can you in an hour,' said I, 'give me a meal to my order, then a bed, though it is early day?' This absurd question I made less absurd by explaining to him my purpose. How I was walking to Rome and how, being northern, I was unaccustomed to such heat; how, therefore, I had missed sleep, and would find it necessary in future to walk mainly by night. For I had now determined to fill the last few marches up in darkness, and to sleep out the strong hours of the sun.

      All this he understood; I ordered such a meal as men give to beloved friends returned from wars. I ordered a wine I had known long ago in the valley of the Saône in the old time of peace before ever the Greek came to the land. While they cooked it I went to their cool and splendid cathedral to follow a late Mass. Then I came home and ate their admirable food and drank the wine which the Burgundians had trodden upon the hills of gold so many years before. They showed me a regal kind of a room where a bed with great hangings invited repose.

      All my days of marching, the dirty inns, the forests, the nights abroad, the cold, the mists, the sleeplessness, the faintness, the dust, the dazzling sun, the Apennines--all my days came over me, and there fell on me a peaceful weight, as his two hundred years fell upon Charlemagne in the tower of Saragossa when the battle was done; after he had curbed the valley of Ebro and christened Bramimonde.

      So I slept deeply all day long; and, outside, the glare made a silence upon the closed shutters, save that little insects darted in the outer air.

      When I woke it was evening. So well had they used me that I paid what they asked, and, not knowing what money remained over, I left their town by the southern gate, crossed the railway and took the road.

      My way lay under the flank of that mountain whereby the Luccans cannot see Pisa, or the Pisans cannot see Lucca--it is all one to me, I shall not live in either town, God willing; and if they are so eager to squint at one another, in Heaven's name, cannot they be at the pains to walk round the end of the hill? It is this laziness which is the ruin of many; but not of pilgrims, for here was I off to cross the plain of Arno in one night, and reach by morning the mouth and gate of that valley of the Elsa, which same is a very manifest proof of how Rome was intended to be the end and centre of all roads, the chief city of the world, and the Popes' residence--as, indeed, it plainly is to this day, for all the world to deny at their peril, spiritual, geographical, historical, sociological, economic, and philosophical.

      For if some such primeval and predestinarian quality were not inherent in the City, how, think you, would the valley of the Serchio--the hot, droughty, and baking Garfagnana--lead down pointing straight to Rome; and how would that same line, prolonged across the plain, find fitting it exactly beyond that plain this vale of the Elsa, itself leading up directly towards Rome? I say, nowhere in the world is such a coincidence observable, and they that will not take it for a portent may go back to their rationalism and consort with microbes and make their meals off logarithms, washed down with an exact distillation of the root of minus one; and the peace of fools, that is the deepest and most balmy of all, be theirs for ever and ever.

      Here again you fall into errors as you read, ever expecting something new; for of that night's march there is nothing to tell, save that it was cool, full of mist, and an easy matter after the royal entertainment and sleep of the princely Albergo that dignifies Lucca. The villages were silent, the moon soon left the sky, and the stars could not show through the fog, which deepened in the hours after midnight.

      A map I had bought in Lucca made the difficulties of the first part of the road (though there were many cross-ways) easy enough; and the second part, in midnight and the early hours, was very plain sailing, till--having crossed the main line and having, at last, very weary, come up to the branch railway at a slant from the west and north, I crossed that also under the full light--I stood fairly in the Elsa valley and on the highroad which follows the railway straight to Siena. That long march, I say, had been easy enough in the coolness and in the dark; but I saw nothing; my interior thoughts alone would have afforded matter for this part; but of these if you have not had enough in near six hundred miles of travel, you are a stouter fellow than I took you for.

      Though it was midsummer, the light had come quickly. Long after sunrise the mist dispersed, and the nature of the valley appeared.

      It was in no way mountainous, but easy, pleasant, and comfortable, bounded by low, rounded hills, having upon them here and there a row of cypresses against the sky; and it was populous with pleasant farms. Though the soil was baked and dry, as indeed it is everywhere in this south, yet little regular streams (or canals) irrigated it and nourished many trees--- but the deep grass of the north was wanting.

      For an hour or more after sunrise I continued my way very briskly; then what had been the warmth of the early sun turned into the violent heat of day, and remembering Merlin where he says that those who will walk by night must sleep by day, and having in my mind the severe verses of James Bayle, sometime Fellow of St Anne's, that 'in Tuscan summers as a general rule, the days are sultry but the nights are cool' (he was no flamboyant poet; he loved the quiet diction of the right wing of English poetry), and imagining an owlish habit of sleeping by day could be acquired at once, I lay down under a tree of a kind I had never seen; and lulled under the pleasant fancy that this was a picture-tree drawn before the Renaissance, and that I was reclining in some background landscape of the fifteenth century (for the scene was of that kind), I fell asleep.

      When I woke it was as though I had slept long; but I doubted the feeling. The young sun still low in the sky, and the shadows not yet shortened, puzzled me. I looked at my watch, but the dislocation of habit which night marches produce had left it unwound. It marked a quarter to three, which was absurd. I took the road somewhat stiffly and wondering. I passed several small white cottages; there was no clock in them, and their people were away. At last in a Trattoria, as they served me with food, a woman told me it was just after seven; I had slept but an hour.

      Outside, the day was intense; already flies had begun to annoy the darkened room within. Through the half-curtained door the road was white in the sun, and the railway ran just beyond.

      I paid my reckoning, and then, partly for an amusement, I ranged my remaining pence upon the table, first in the shape of a Maltese cross, then in a circle (interesting details!). The road lay white in the sunlight outside, and the railway ran just beyond.

      I counted the pence and the silver--there was three francs and a little over; I remembered the imperial largesse at Lucca, the lordly spending of great sums, where, now in the pocket of an obsequious man, the pounds were taking care of themselves. I remembered how at Como I had been compelled by poverty to enter the train for Milan. How little was three francs for the remaining twenty-five miles to Siena! The road lay white in the sunlight, and the railway ran just beyond.

      I remembered the pleasing cheque in the