, the heat was increasing, but it
seemed far more bearable than it had been in the earlier places; in
the oven of the Garfagnana or in the deserts of Siena. For with the
first slopes of the mountain a forest of great chestnut trees
appeared, and it was so cool under these that there was even moss, as
though I were back again in my own country where there are full rivers
in summer-time, deep meadows, and all the completion of home.

Also the height may have begun to tell on the air, but not much, for
when the forest was behind me, and when I had come to a bare heath
sloping more gently upwards--a glacis in front of the topmost bulwark
of the round mountain--- I was oppressed with thirst, and though it
was not too hot to sing (for I sang, and two lonely carabinieri passed
me singing, and we recognized as we saluted each other that the
mountain was full of songs), yet I longed for a bench, a flagon, and
shade.

And as I longed, a little house appeared, and a woman in the shade
sewing, and an old man. Also a bench and a table, and a tree over it.
There I sat down and drank white wine and water many times. The woman
charged me a halfpenny, and the old man would not talk. He did not
take his old age garrulously. It was his business, not mine; but I
should dearly have liked to have talked to him in Lingua Franca, and
to have heard him on the story of his mountain: where it was haunted,
by what, and on which nights it was dangerous to be abroad. Such as it
was, there it was. I left them, and shall perhaps never see them
again.

The road was interminable, and the crest, from which I promised myself
the view of the crater-lake, was always just before me, and was never
reached. A little spring, caught in a hollow log, refreshed a meadow
on the right. Drinking there again, I wondered if I should go on or
rest; but I was full of antiquity, and a memory in the blood, or what
not, impelled me to see the lake in the crater before I went to sleep:
after a few hundred yards this obsession was satisfied.

I passed between two banks, where the road had been worn down at the
crest of the volcano's rim; then at once, far below, in a circle of
silent trees with here and there a vague shore of marshy land, I saw
the Pond of Venus: some miles of brooding water, darkened by the dark
slopes around it. Its darkness recalled the dark time before the dawn
of our saved and happy world.

At its hither end a hill, that had once been a cone in t