“Would the stranger accompany him to his hut?”
“It would give me pleasure, but it is growing late.”
“We are poor, but we could give you milk and cheese. You would be welcome.”
“I know it. Like you, I love the forest and the mountain, the shade and the sunshine; but yours must be a rough life.”
“It is our lot, and we are content. We toil not, and we love our freedom.”
“I should like some memorial of having met you, anything to show that I have talked with an Englishman.”
My friend rapidly dashed off a slight sketch, a rough portrait, I think, of his gaunt visitor—no bad subject for the pencil.
“I would rather it had been your own portrait; but I shall keep it in remembrance of you.”
And so they parted; the civilised man to tell his little story of human feeling and native intelligence, “spending their sweetness in the desert air,”—the shepherd to relate his adventure over the watchfire, and perhaps draw forth from some sexagenarian herdsman his boyish recollections of the fall of San Fiorenzo and Bastia, and the march of the English red-coats over the mountains.
_Chain of the Serra di Tenda.—A Night at Bigorno.—A Hospitable Priest.—Descent to the Golo._
After crossing for some distance an elevated plateau of this wild country, we came to a boundary wall of rough boulders, and turned to take a last view of the gulf of San Fiorenzo and the blue Mediterranean. A heavy gate was swung open, and, on advancing a few hundred yards, the scene suddenly changed. We found ourselves on the brink of a steep descent, with a sea of mountains before us, branching from the great central chain, and having innumerable ramifications. This part of the chain is called the Serra di Tenda; and its highest peak the Monte Asto, upwards of 5000 feet above the level of the sea, rose directly in front of our point of view. A single altar-shaped rock crowned the summit, from which the continuation of the ridge, right and left, fell away in a singularly graceful outline, the face of the mountain being precipitous with escarped cliffs. In other parts of the line, the summits were sharply serrated. Northward it was lost in the far distance among clouds and mist, but to the south-west of Monte Asto a similar, but more blunted peak towered above all the others. I observed on our maps that several of the summits in this range have the name of _Monte Rosso_; and the centre of the group was indented by a deep gorge richly wooded, as were other ravines, and forests hung on some of the mountain sides.