d confusion, the
labourer sought to forget his labour. More and more as I went among them
it seemed to me that the mountains had brutalised those who won from
them their snowy treasure. In all Carrara and the valley of Torano I saw
no beautiful or distinguished faces,--the women were without sweetness,
the men a mere gang of workmen. Now, common as this is in any
manufacturing city of the North, it is very uncommon in Italy, where
humanity has not been injured and enslaved by machinery as it has with
us. You may generally find beauty, sweetness, or wisdom in the faces of
a Tuscan crowd in any place. Only here you will see the man who has
become just the fellow-labourer of the ox.

I understood this better when, about four o'clock on the next morning, I
went in the company of a lame youth into the quarries themselves. There
are some half-dozen of them, glens of marble that lead you into the
heart of the mountains, valleys without shade, full of a brutal
coldness, an intolerable heat, a dazzling light, a darkness that may be
felt. Torano, that little town you come upon at the very threshold of
the quarries, is like a town of the Middle Age, full of stones and
refuse and narrow ways that end in a blind nothingness, and low houses
without glass in the windows, and dogs and cats and animals of all
sorts, goats and chickens and pigs, among which the people live. Thus
busy with the frightful labour among the stones in the heart of the
mountains, where no green thing has ever grown or even a bird built her
nest, where in summer the sun looks down like some enormous moloch, and
in winter the frost and the cold scourge them to their labour in the
horrid ghostly twilight, the people work. The roads are mere tracks
among the blocks and hills of broken marble, yellow, black, and white
stones, that are hauled on enormous trolleys by a line of bullocks in
which you may often find a horse or a pony. Staggering along this way of
torture, sweating, groaning, rebelling, under the whips and curses and
kicks of the labourers, who either sit cursing on the wagon among the
marble, or, armed with great whips, slash and cut at the poor capering,
patient brutes, the oxen drag these immense wagons over the sharp
boulders and dazzling rocks, grinding them in pieces, cutting themselves
with sharp stones, pulling as though to break their hearts under the
tyranny of the stones, not less helpless and insensate than they. Here
and there you may see an