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