The storm showed no sign
of coming to an end. Several times the carriage stopped, and the lad
got down to examine his horses--perhaps to sympathize with them;
he was such a drenched, battered, pitiable object that I reproached
myself for allowing him to pursue the journey.
"_Brutto tempo_!" he screamed above the uproar, when I again spoke
to him; but in such a cheery tone that I did not think it worth
while to make any further remark.
Through the driving rain, I studied as well as I could the features
of the country. On my left hand stretched a long fiat-topped
mountain, forming the southern slope of the valley we ascended;
steep, dark, and furrowed with innumerable torrent-beds, it frowned
upon a river that rushed along the ravine at its foot to pour into
the sea where the mountain broke as a rugged cliff. This was the
Mons Moscius of old time, which sheltered the monastery built by
Cassiodorus. The headlong, swollen flood, coloured like yellow clay,
held little resemblance to the picture I had made of that river
Pellena which murmurs so musically in the old writer's pages.
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