the sense of the night, no marvels
of the dawn, no rhodomontade, no religion, no rhetoric, no sleeping
villages, no silent towns (there was one), no rustle of trees--just a
short story, and there you have a whole march covered as though a
brigade had swung down it. A new day has come, and the sun has risen
over the detestable parched hillocks of this downward way.

No, no, Lector! Do not blame me that Tuscany should have passed
beneath me unnoticed, as the monotonous sea passes beneath a boat in
full sail. Blame all those days of marching; hundreds upon hundreds of
miles that exhausted the powers of the mind. Blame the fiery and angry
sky of Etruria, that compelled most of my way to be taken at night.
Blame St Augustine, who misled me in his Confessions by talking like
an African of 'the icy shores of Italy'; or blame Rome, that now more
and more drew me to Herself as She approached from six to five, from
five to four, from four to three--now She was but _three_ days off.
The third sun after that I now saw rising would shine upon the City.

I did indeed go forward a little in the heat, but it was useless.
After an hour I abandoned it. It was not so much the sun, though that
was intemperate and deadly; it was rather the inhuman aspect of the
earth which made me despair. It was as though the soil had been left
imperfect and rough after some cataclysm; it reminded me of those bad
lands in the west of America, where the desert has no form, and where
the crumbling and ashy look of things is more abhorrent than their
mere desolation. As soon march through evil dreams!

The north is the place for men. Eden was there; and the four rivers of
Paradise are the Seine, the Oise, the Thames, and the Arun; there are
grasses there, and the trees are generous, and the air is an unnoticed
pleasure. The waters brim up to the edges of the fields. But for this
bare Tuscany I was never made.

How far I had gone I could not tell, nor precisely how much farther
San Quirico, the neighbouring town, might be. The imperfect map I had
bought at Siena was too minute to give me clear indications. I was
content to wait for evening, and then to go on till I found it. An
hour or so in the shade of a row of parched and dusty bushes I lay and
ate and drank my wine, and smoked, and then all day I slept, and woke
a while, and slept again more deeply. But how people sleep and wake,
if you do not yet know it after so much of this book you never will.

I