e, like a fan to puff up his impostures, the bill
of sale of a marble quarry at a place said to be "Taverna," two hours'
distance from Pozzonegro. Profiting by our stay here, I got on a mule
this morning, without telling any one, and guided by a tall scamp of
a fellow with legs like a deer--true type of a Corsican poacher or
smuggler, his thick, red pipe in his mouth, his gun in a bandoleer--I
went to Taverna. After a fearful progress across cracked rocks and bogs,
past abysses of unsoundable depths--on the very edges of which my
mule maliciously walked as though to mark them out with her shoes--we
arrived, by an almost perpendicular descent, at the end of our journey.
It was a vast desert of rocks, absolutely bare, all white with the
droppings of gulls and sea-fowl, for the sea is at the bottom, quite
near, and the silence of the place was broken only by the flow of the
waves and the shrill cries of the wheeling circles of birds. My guide,
who has a holy horror of excisemen and the police, stayed above on the
cliff, because of a little coastguard station posted like a watchman on
the shore. I made for a large red building which still maintained, in
this burning solitude its three stories, in spite of broken windows
and ruinous tiles. Over the worm-eaten door was an immense sign-board:
"Territorial Bank. Carr----bre----54." The wind, the sun, the rain, have
wiped out the rest.

There has been there, certainly, a commencement of operations, for a
large square, gaping hole, cut out with a punch, is still open in the
ground, showing along its crumbling sides, like a leopard's spots, red
slabs with brown veins, and at the bottom, in the brambles, enormous
blocks of the marble, called in the trade "black-heart" (marble spotted
with red and brown), condemned blocks that no one could make anything of
for want of a road leading to the quarry or a harbour to make the coast
accessible for freight ships, and for want, above all, of subsidies
considerable enough to carry out one or the other of these two projects.
So the quarry remains abandoned, at a few cable-lengths from the
shore, as cumbrous and useless as Robinson Crusoe's canoe in the same
unfortunate circumstances. These details of the heart-rending story of
our sole territorial wealth were furnished by a miserable caretaker,
shaking with fever, whom I found in the low-ceilinged room of the yellow
house trying to roast a piece of kid over the acrid smoke of a pistachio
bush