more navigable, perhaps less beautiful. Rivers change like nations.
There have been landslips which have altered its course and made its
torrents. In some parts it is shallower, in others deeper. The woods
which enclosed its course then have been largely felled, though not
wholly. Sand has been dug from it incessantly, and rocks have fallen
across it. As you know, no boats or barges which draw any depth of
water can ascend or descend it now without being towed by horses; and
in some parts, as here, it is course, too precipitous in its fall for
even small boats to adventure themselves upon it: its shoals of
lilies can blossom unmolested where its surface is level. Yes;
undoubtedly, the lords of Ruscino were also lords of the Edera, from
its mouth to its source; and their river formed at once their
strongest defence and their weakest point. It was difficult
sufficiently to guard so many miles of water; above all because, as I
say, its course was so much clearer, and its depth so much greater,
that a flotilla of rafts or cutters could ascend it from its mouth as
far as this town in the Middle Ages; in fact, more than once,
corsairs from the Levant and from Morocco did so ascend it, and
though they were driven back by the culverins of the citadel, they
every time carried off to slavery some of the youths and maidens of
the plain."

Adone gazed across the river to the moss-grown walls which had once
been fortifications still visible on the side of the hill, and to the
frowning donjon, the blackened towers, the ruined bastions, of what
had been once the Rocca, with the amber light and rosy clouds of the
unseen sun behind them.

"Teach me Latin, your reverence," was all he said.