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The Path to Rome by Hilaire Belloc
page 87 of 311 (27%)
cities in the world and he remembered their minutest details. He was
extremely accurate, his taste was abominable, his patriotism large,
his wit crude but continual, and to his German friend, to the host of
the inn, and to the blonde serving-girl, he was a familiar god. He
came, it seems, once a year, and for a day would pour out the torrent
of his travels like a waterfall of guide-books (for he gloried in
dates, dimensions, and the points of the compass in his descriptions);
then he disappeared for another year, and left them to feast on the
memory of such a revelation.

For my part I sat silent, crippled with fatigue, trying to forget my
wounded feet, drinking stoup after stoup of beer and watching the
Phocean. He was of the old race you see on vases in red and black;
slight, very wiry, with a sharp, eager, but well-set face, a small,
black, pointed beard, brilliant eyes like those of lizards, rapid
gestures, and a vivacity that played all over his features as sheet
lightning does over the glow of midnight in June.

That delta of the Rhone is something quite separate from the rest of
France. It is a wedge of Greece and of the East thrust into the Gauls.
It came north a hundred years ago and killed the monarchy. It caught
the value in, and created, the great war song of the Republic.

I watched the Phocean. I thought of a man of his ancestry three
thousand years ago sitting here at the gates of these mountains
talking of his travels to dull, patient, and admiring northerners, and
travelling for gain up on into the Germanics, and I felt the
changeless form of Europe under me like a rock.

When he heard I was walking to Rome, this man of information turned
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