orting
of a horse, the bellow of a bullock in pain, seem like some fantastic
dream of a new Inferno; but when at last the enormous sun has risen over
the mountains, and flooded the glens with furious heat, it is as though
you walked in some delirium, a shining world full of white fire dancing
in agony around you. You stumble along, sometimes waiting till a wagon
and twelve oxen have been beaten and thrust past you on the ascent,
sometimes driven half mad by the booming of the dynamite, here threading
an icy tunnel, there on the edge of a precipice, almost fainting in the
heat, listening madly to the sound of water far below. Then, as you
return through the sinister town of Torano with its sickening sights and
smells, you come into the pandemonium of the workshops, where nothing
has a being but the shriek of the rusty saws drenched with water, driven
by machinery, cutting the marble into uniform slabs to line urinals or
pave a closet. At last, in a sort of despair, overwhelmed with heat and
noise, you reach your inn, and though it be midday in July, you seize
your small baggage and set out where the difficult road leads out of
this spoiled valley to the olives and the sea.

* * * * *

It was midday when, in spite of the sun, I set out up the long hill that
leads to La Foce and Massa from Carrara. It is a road that turns
continually on itself, climbing always, among the olive woods and
chestnuts, where the girls sing as they herd the goats, and the pleasant
murmur of the summer, the song of the cicale, the wind of the hills,
cleanse your heart of the horror of Carrara. Climbing thus at peace with
yourself for a long hour, you come suddenly to La Foce, a sort of ridge
or pass between the loftier hills, whence you may see the long-hidden
sea, and Montignoso, that old Lombard castle still fierce above the
olive woods, and Massa itself, Massa Ducale, a lofty precipitous city
crowned by an old fortress. Who may describe the beauty of the way under
the far-away peaks of marble, splendid in their rugged gesture, their
immortal perfection and indifference! And indeed, from La Foce all the
noise and cruelty of that life in the quarries at Carrara is forgotten.
As you begin to descend by the beautiful road that winds along the sides
of the hills, the burden of those immense quarries, echoing with cries
of distress inarticulate and pitiful, falls away from one. Here is Italy
herself, fair as a goddess