e would charge
me a reasonable sum. I insisted that the day was too hot for walking.
They told me, did these Etruscans, that I need fear no extortion from
so honest a man.

Certainly it is not easy to make everybody understand everything, and
I had had experience already up in the mountains, days before, of how
important it is not to be misunderstood when one is wandering in a
foreign country, poor and ill-clad. I therefore accepted the offer,
and, what was really very much to my regret, I paid the money he
demanded. I even so far fell in with the spirit of the thing as to
sleep a certain number of hours (for after all, my sleep that day in
the cart had been very broken, and instead of resting throughout the
whole of the heat I had taken a meal at Acquapendente). But I woke up
not long after midnight--perhaps between one and two o'clock--and went
out along the borders of the lake.

The moon had set; I wish I could have seen her hanging at the quarter
in the clear sky of that high crater, dipping into the rim of its
inland sea. It was perceptibly cold. I went on the road quite slowly,
till it began to climb, and when the day broke I found myself in a
sunken lane leading up to the town of Montefiascone.

The town lay on its hill in the pale but growing light. A great dome
gave it dignity, and a castle overlooked the lake. It was built upon
the very edge and lip of the volcano-cup commanding either side.

I climbed up this sunken lane towards it, not knowing what might be
beyond, when, at the crest, there shone before me in the sunrise one
of those unexpected and united landscapes which are among the glories
of Italy. They have changed the very mind in a hundred northern
painters, when men travelled hither to Rome to learn their art, and
coming in by her mountain roads saw, time and again, the set views of
plains like gardens, surrounded by sharp mountain-land and framed.

The road did not pass through the town; the grand though crumbling
gate of entry lay up a short straight way to the right, and below,
where the road continued down the slope, was a level of some eight
miles full of trees diminishing in distance. At its further side an
ample mountain, wooded, of gentle flattened outline, but high and
majestic, barred the way to Rome. It was yet another of those
volcanoes, fruitful after death, which are the mark of Latium: and it
held hidden, as did that larger and more confused one on the rim of
which I stood, a