e inn with bad wine, scanty fare and high charges, we took a
hasty breakfast, and procuring a guide we walked out to see the
curiosities of the place. It rained hard and the road was excessively
bad, sometimes almost ankle-deep in mud. Notwithstanding the forbidding
weather and bad road, we labored up the deep ravine on the sides of which
the excavations are made. Dark peaks frowned above us capped with clouds
and snow; white patches midway the sides showed the veins of the marble,
and immense heaps of detritus, the accumulation of ages, mountains
themselves, sloped down on each side like masses of piled ice to the very
edge of the road. The road itself, white with the material of which it is
made, was composed of loose pieces of the white marble of every size....
Continuing the ascent by the side of a milky stream, which rushed down
its rocky bed, and which here and there was diverted off into aqueducts
to the various mills, we were pointed to the top of a high hill by the
roadside where was the entrance to a celebrated grotto, and at the base
close by, a cavern protected a beautiful, clear, crystal fountain, which
gushed from up the bottom forming a liquid, transparent floor, and then
glided to mingle its pure, unsullied waters with the cloudy stream that
rushed by it.

"Climbing over piles of rock like refined sugar and passing several
wagons carrying heavy blocks down the road, we arrived at the mouth of
the principal quarry where the purest statuary marble is obtained. I
could not but think how many exquisite statues here lay entombed for
ages, till genius, at various times, called them from their slumbers and
bid them live....

"On our return we again passed the wagons laden with blocks, and mules
with slabs on each side sometimes like the roof of a house over the
mule.... The wagons and oxen deserve notice. The former are very badly
constructed; they are strong, but the wheels are small, in diameter about
two feet and but about three inches wide, so sharp that the roads must
suffer from them. The oxen are small and, without exception,
mouse-colored. The driver, and there is usually one to each pair, sits on
the yoke between them, and, like the oarsman of a boat, with his back
towards the point towards which he is going. Two huge blocks were chained
upon one of these wagons, and behind, dragging upon the ground by a chain,
was another. Three yoke of these small oxen, apparently without fatigue,
drew the load thus