t was perhaps five o'clock, or rather more, when I rose unhappily and
took up the ceaseless road.

Even the goodness of the Italian nature seemed parched up in those dry
hollows. At an inn where I ate they shouted at me, thinking in that
way to make me understand; and their voices were as harsh as the
grating of metal against stone. A mile farther I crossed a lonely line
of railway; then my map told me where I was, and I went wearily up an
indefinite slope under the declining sun, and thought it outrageous
that only when the light had gone was there any tolerable air in this
country.

Soon the walls of San Quirico, partly ruinous, stood above the fields
(for the smallest places here have walls); as I entered its gate the
sun set, and as though the cool, coming suddenly, had a magic in it,
everything turned kinder. A church that could wake interest stood at
the entry of the town; it had stone lions on its steps, and the
pillars were so carved as to resemble knotted ropes. There for the
first time I saw in procession one of those confraternities which in
Italy bury the dead; they had long and dreadful hoods over their
heads, with slits for the eyes. I spoke to the people of San Quirico,
and they to me. They were upstanding, and very fine and noble in the
lines of the face. On their walls is set a marble tablet, on which it
is registered that the people of Tuscany, being asked whether they
would have their hereditary Duke or the House of Savoy, voted for the
latter by such and such a great majority; and this kind of tablet I
afterwards found was common to all these small towns. Then passing
down their long street I came, at the farther gate, to a great sight,
which the twilight still permitted me to receive in its entirety.

For San Quirico is built on the edge of a kind of swell in the land,
and here where I stood one looked over the next great wave; for the
shape of the view was, on a vast scale, just what one sees from a
lonely boat looking forward over a following sea.

The trough of the wave was a shallow purple valley, its arid quality
hidden by the kindly glimmer of evening; few trees stood in it to
break its sweep, and its irregularities and mouldings were just those
of a sweep of water after a gale. The crest of the wave beyond was
seventeen miles away. It had, as have also such crests at sea, one
highest, toppling peak in its long line, and this, against the clear
sky, one could see to be marked by buildings.