chief of a tiny hamlet
of three houses, called Califano because the Califanos had made it.
There was the ancient, savage hole of a house, quite windowless,
where Pancrazio and Ciccio's mother had been born: the family home.
Then there was Pancrazio's villa. And then, a little below, another
newish, modern house in a sort of wild meadow, inhabited by the
peasants who worked the land. Ten minutes' walk away was another
cluster of seven or eight houses, where Giovanni lived. But there
was no shop, no post nearer than Pescocalascio, an hour's heavy
road up deep and rocky, wearying tracks.

And yet, what could be more lovely than the sunny days: pure, hot,
blue days among the mountain foothills: irregular, steep little
hills half wild with twiggy brown oak-trees and marshes and broom
heaths, half cultivated, in a wild, scattered fashion. Lovely, in
the lost hollows beyond a marsh, to see Ciccio slowly ploughing with
two great white oxen: lovely to go with Pancrazio down to the wild
scrub that bordered the river-bed, then over the white-bouldered,
massive desert and across stream to the other scrubby savage shore,
and so up to the high-road. Pancrazio was very happy if Alvina would
accompany him. He liked it that she was not afraid. And her sense of
the beauty of the place was an infinite relief to him.

Nothing could have been more marvellous than the winter twilight.
Sometimes Alvina and Pancrazio were late returning with the ass. And
then gingerly the ass would step down the steep banks, already
beginning to freeze when the sun went down. And again and again he
would balk the stream, while a violet-blue dusk descended on the
white, wide stream-bed, and the scrub and lower hills became dark,
and in heaven, oh, almost unbearably lovely, the snow of the near
mountains was burning rose, against the dark-blue heavens. How
unspeakably lovely it was, no one could ever tell, the grand, pagan
twilight of the valleys, savage, cold, with a sense of ancient gods
who knew the right for human sacrifice. It stole away the soul of
Alvina. She felt transfigured in it, clairvoyant in another mystery
of life. A savage hardness came in her heart. The gods who had
demanded human sacrifice were quite right, immutably right. The
fierce, savage gods who dipped their lips in blood, these were the
true gods.

The terror, the agony, the nostalgia of the heathen past was a
constant torture to her mediumistic soul. She did not know what it
was.