nd
fierce, barked furiously at the carriage and plunged furiously after it,
pulling up suddenly and turning back with a growl when they had followed
it for half a minute. The women, in ragged black or dark, checked
skirts, with torn red woollen shawls hanging from their heads, glanced
sidelong at Veronica, when they were still young; but the older ones
went by without giving her a look, their leathern, Sibylline faces set,
their old lids wrinkled by everlasting effort till they almost hid the
small dark eyes. The most of them carried something in their
hands,--faggots, covered baskets, small sacks of potatoes, or corn, or
beans; and when the load was heavy they walked with a sharp, jerking
turn of the hips to right and left that was almost like a dislocation,
and the wrinkles in the faces of these heavy-laden ones were deep folds,
as in the hide of a loose-skinned beast. For in that country to be
strong is to be cursed; it means double work and double burden, where
everything that breathes and moves and can be found to labour is driven
to the very breaking point of strain.

But as Veronica drove on, there were fewer men and women in the road,
and only once in an hour or so, a huge cart, piled up with wine barrels,
lumbered along, drawn by four or five deathly-looking mules that
stumbled when they had to stop or start--shadowy creatures, the ghosts
of their kind, as it were.

The villages were worse than the open country, for in them the appalling
poverty was gathered together in its muddiest colours and set in fixed
pictures which Veronica never forgot. In the May weather, the doors of
low dwellings were open, and the black and white pigs wandered
unhindered from the filthy street without to the misery within,
fattening on the poor waste of the desperately poor, fattening in the
sun that drove their wretched betters to the daily fight with
starvation, fattening in the vile filth to which starvation was dully
indifferent, since cleanliness meant labour that brought no bread.

To the right and left the barren mountains reared their enormous
baldness to the sun, deserts raised up broadside, as it were, and set on
end, that their bareness might be the better seen and known to the world
around. Here and there, from their bases, dark wooded spurs ran out
across the rising valley, and the road wound round them, in and out, and
up and down, and over stone bridges big and little, and then up in
terribly steep ascent, southeas