We believed him and set out. The road rises steeply from Florence, climbs to twelve or fifteen hundred feet and then plunges down again into that long flat-bottomed valley locked in the midst of the hills, the Mugello. By the time we had reached it the sun had entirely disappeared, and the sky above us was one vast yellowish-white snowcloud. Looking at the various castelli one passes by the way, I found Browning’s predilections more than ever incomprehensible.
Between Florence and Bologna there are two passes: the Futa and, five or six miles further on, the pass of Raticosa. It is near the top of the Futa that the Grand Dukes built the bulwark against the wind. It was strengthened, that day, by heaps of driven snow. Below and above, the slopes were deep in snow. In the midst of all this whiteness the road wound onwards and upwards like a muddy snake.
Under the lee of the wall we halted and took photographs of the Italian scenery. The air was calm where we stood and seemed in its stillness almost warm. But just above us, on a level with the top of the wall, was the wind. The snowflakes that it carried made its speed visible. It filled the ears with sound. I was reminded, as I stood there, of a rather ludicrous and deplorable version of David Copperfield, which Beerbohm Tree used sometimes to stage at His Majesty’s. Tree himself acted two parts—Micawber and Peggotty; the former, I may add parenthetically, very well indeed (for he was an admirable comedian), the latter, in his more pathetic manner, with less success.
But let that pass. Dressed as Peggotty, Tree never made an entrance without the wind; it was in the bluff nautical part. Every time he opened the door of his ship cottage on the sands of Yarmouth there came from the outer darkness a noise like the witches’ sabbath. It never blew less than a full gale during the whole run of David Copperfield. Whoo-oo-oo-oo-oo—crescendo and decrescendo. In the dress-circle ladies reached for their furs, men turned up the collars of their coats. It was horrible. I had hoped then that I should never hear a wind like that outside His Majesty’s. And I never did till that icy March day when we paused beneath the Grand-Ducal wall on the road from Florence to Bologna. There, for the first time, I heard nature rivalling Sir Herbert’s art. A perfect site, I reflected, for the Castello Browning.
At Pietramala, which lies just under the pass of the Raticosa, we stopped at the little inn for lunch. The idlers who gathered immediately and as though by magic round our machine—for even at Pietramala, even in the snow, there were leisured car-fanciers to whom the arrival of a ten-horse-power Citroën was an event—lost no time in telling us that the road on the further side of the pass was blocked with wind-driven snow. We went in to our lunch feeling a little depressed—a little annoyed, too, with the garage man at Florence.
The inn-keeper, however, was reassuring; gangs of men, he told us, were to be sent out as soon as the dinner hour was over from Pietramala and the village on the other side of the pass. By four o’clock the road would be clear; we should be in Bologna before dark. When we asked if the road by Firenzuola and Imola were open, he shook his head. For the second time that day we believed.
The inn-keeper’s motives for not telling the truth were different from those that actuated the man at the garage. For the latter had lied out of misplaced politeness and pride; the inn-keeper on the contrary, lied merely out of self-interest. He wanted to make us stay the night. He was perfectly successful. At four o’clock we set out. At the top of the pass the snow lay a yard deep across the road, and there was not a shoveller to be seen. We returned. The inn-keeper was astonished: what, no shovellers? He could hardly believe it. But to-morrow morning the road would infallibly be cleared. We decided to stay the night.
I had taken with me on that journey the second volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica—And.-Aus. It is a capital volume from which one can derive much useful knowledge about Angiosperms, the Anglican Communion, Angling, Anthrax, Aphasia, Apples, Arrowroot, Asia, Aurora Borealis and Australia, not to mention Anthropology, Archeology, Architecture, Art, Astrology and Astronomy. I started hopefully on Animal Worship. ‘The bear,’ I learned, ‘enjoys a large measure of respect from all savage races that come in contact with it.’ From me, that evening, he got a large measure of envy. I thought of Mr. Belloc’s rhyme:
The Polar Bear is unaware
Of cold that cuts me through:
For why? He has a coat of hair.
I wish I had one too!
For in spite of the fire, in spite of great-coats, it was appallingly cold. ‘The products of the cow,’ I read on, and was charmed by the compendious euphemism, ‘are important in magic.’ But I got no further; it was too cold even to read. To this day I remain ignorant of the feelings of the Thlinkit Indians towards the crow, of the Kalangs towards the dog and the Siamese towards white elephants. And if I do happen to know that the Hottentot god, Cagn, is incarnated in the praying mantis, Ngo, that is due to the fact that I took the same volume with me on another tour during the summer, when the evenings were less inclement and the mind was free to devote itself to higher things than the problem of mere self-preservation.
It was cold enough in the sitting-room; but the horror only really began when we went to bed. For the bedrooms of the inn were without fireplaces; there was no possibility of heating them. In those bedrooms one could have preserved mutton indefinitely. Still dressed in all the woolly garments we possessed, we got into our stony beds. Outside the wind continued to howl among the hills. While the sheets were yet unthawed, sleep was out of the question. I lay awake listening to the noise of the wind and wondering what would be the effect of the hurricane on those flaming jets of natural gas for which Pietramala is renowned. Would the wind blow out those giant will-o’-the-wisps? Or would they burn on in spite of it? The thought of flames was comforting; I dwelt on them with a certain complaisance.
They are not uncommon, these jets of fire, among the northern Apennines. Salsomaggiore, for example, owes its coat of arms, a salamander among the flames, to its fountains of natural gas. It is in this gaseous form alone that the hydrocarbons of the Apennines make their appearance at the centre of the chain. On the outer slopes they are to be found in the more commercially useful form of petroleum, which is now extracted in small quantities from the foothills in the neighbourhood of Piacenza, Reggio and Modena. Who knows, we may yet live to see the towers of Canossa rivalled by the wooden castles of the derricks on the slopes below.
The shutters rattled, the wind howled. Decidedly, no fire could burn in the teeth of such a blast. Poor ignes fatui! how welcome we should have made them in this ice-house! How tenderly, like vestals, we should have cherished any flame, however fatuous!
From thinking of those flames and wishing that I had them in the room with me, I went on to wonder why it was that the gas-fires of Pietramala should be so oddly familiar to me. Had I read about them? Had I recently heard them mentioned in conversation, or what? I racked my brains. And then suddenly I remembered; it was in Bence Jones’s Life and Letters of Faraday that I had read of Pietramala.
One very wet day in the autumn of 1814 two rather queer English tourists alighted from their chaise in this squalid little village of Pietramala. One was approaching middle age, the other still a very young man. Their names were Sir Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday. They had been out of England almost exactly a year. For it was in the year 1813, just before the news of the battle of Leipzig had reached Paris, that they crossed into France. To us it seems in the natural order of things that science and religion should be national affairs, that clergymen should scream ‘Hurrah and Hallelujah’ and chemists cheer for the flag and H2SO4.
But it was not always so. God and the works of God were once considered international. God was the first to be nationalized; after the Reformation he once more became frankly tribal. But science and even art were still above patriotism. During the eighteenth century France and England exchanged ideas almost as freely as cannon balls. French scientific expeditions were allowed to pass in safety between the English fleets; Sterne was welcomed enthusiastically by his country’s enemies.
The tradition lingered on even
