beyond was a vision of dark foliage, and the high hillside.
I saw it often, and yet for a long time it never occurred to me that it
actually existed. It was like a vision, a thing one does not expect to
come close to. It was there standing away upon the house-tops, against a
glamour of foliaged hillside. I was submerged in the village, on the
uneven, cobbled street, between old high walls and cavernous shops and
the houses with flights of steps.
For a long time I knew how the day went, by the imperious clangour of
midday and evening bells striking down upon the houses and the edge of
the lake. Yet it did not occur to me to ask where these bells rang. Till
at last my everyday trance was broken in upon, and I knew the ringing of
the Church of San Tommaso. The church became a living connexion with me.
So I set out to find it, I wanted to go to it. It was very near. I could
see it from the piazza by the lake. And the village itself had only a
few hundreds of inhabitants. The church must be within a stone's throw.
Yet I could not find it. I went out of the back door of the house, into
the narrow gully of the back street. Women glanced down at me from the
top of the flights of steps, old men stood, half-turning, half-crouching
under the dark shadow of the walls, to stare. It was as if the strange
creatures of the under-shadow were looking at me. I was of
another element.
The Italian people are called 'Children of the Sun'. They might better
be called 'Children of the Shadow'. Their souls are dark and nocturnal.
If they are to be easy, they must be able to hide, to be hidden in lairs
and caves of darkness. Going through these tiny chaotic backways of the
village was like venturing through the labyrinth made by furtive
creatures, who watched from out of another element. And I was pale, and
clear, and evanescent, like the light, and they were dark, and close,
and constant, like the shadow.
So I was quite baffled by the tortuous, tiny, deep passages of the
village. I could not find my way. I hurried towards the broken end of a
street, where the sunshine and the olive trees looked like a mirage
before me. And there above me I saw the thin, stiff neck of old San
Tommaso, grey and pale in the sun. Yet I could not get up to the church,
I found myself again on the piazza.
Another day, however, I found a broken staircase, where weeds grew in
the gaps the steps had made in falling, and maidenhair hung on the
darker side of the wall. I went up unwillingly, because the Italians
used this old staircase as a privy, as they will any deep side-passage.
But I ran up the broken stairway, and came out suddenly, as by a
miracle, clean on the platform of my San Tommaso, in the
tremendous sunshine.
It was another world, the world of the eagle, the world of fierce
abstraction. It was all clear, overwhelming sunshine, a platform hung in
the light. Just below were the confused, tiled roofs of the village, and
beyond them the pale blue water, down below; and opposite, opposite my
face and breast, the clear, luminous snow of the mountain across the
lake, level with me apparently, though really much above.
I was in the skies now, looking down from my square terrace of cobbled
pavement, that was worn like the threshold of the ancient church. Round
the terrace ran a low, broad wall, the coping of the upper heaven where
I had climbed.
There was a blood-red sail like a butterfly breathing down on the blue
water, whilst the earth on the near side gave off a green-silver smoke
of olive trees, coming up and around the earth-coloured roofs.
It always remains to me that San Tommaso and its terrace hang suspended
above the village, like the lowest step of heaven, of Jacob's ladder.
Behind, the land rises in a high sweep. But the terrace of San Tommaso
is let down from heaven, and does not touch the earth.
I went into the church. It was very dark, and impregnated with centuries
of incense. It affected me like the lair of some enormous creature. My
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