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The men grinned again, and went off, while Ralph walked slowly away to where he could throw himself down at the side of the cliff in the sunshine, swing his legs over the edge, where it was nice and dangerous if he slipped, and finally leaned back to rest on one elbow, and gaze in the direction of the high cliff beyond the depression, where the men were gone to chip out pieces of the soft spongy-looking tufa, which lay in beds on the slope.
His father’s house has perished, it is true, through “Nature’s changing force untrimmed,” for the greedy waves have undermined and swallowed up the tufa cliff which once supported the old Tasso villa. But there is still standing in Strada di San Nicola the old Sersale mansion, wherein the good Cornelia received her long-lost brother in his peasant’s guise, an unhappy exile from haughty Ferrara.
He will then occupy the spot of which we wish to present to him one of the fairest panoramas of earth. On his right stands a high, rocky island of dark tufa, rendered gay, amid all its magnificent formations, by smiling vineyards and teeming villages, and interesting by ruins that commemorate events as remote as the Caesars.
Fodder of all kinds is very scarce in the volcanic tufa of which all that land consists, and any moment that one stopped was always devoted by our ponies to grubbing for blades of grass in the holes.
Here and there were a few grotesque blackened and branchless stumps. The side of the devastated forest was even more barren than Tadorn Marsh. The eruption of lava had been complete. Where formerly sprang up that charming verdure, the soil was now nothing but a savage mass of volcanic tufa.
The entire formation of the chain, as far as it faces the Rio Grande, is volcanic, the walls of the gorges consisting generally of a friable white or yellowish tufa containing nodules of black, translucent obsidian. The rock is so soft that in many places it can be scooped out or detached with the most primitive tools, or even with the fingers alone.
'There is the palazzo and the village. In front of them, indeed, rose an old villa of the Renaissance, with its long flat roofs, its fine loggia, and terraced vineyards. A rude village of grey stone, part, it seemed, of the tufa rocks from which it sprang, pressed round the villa, invaded its olive-gardens, crept up to its very walls. Meanwhile the earth grew kinder and more fertile.
It is composed of a quadrangular gallery formed by a triple line of small granite, tufa, or stucco columns. Acanthus, thistles, ivy, and oak-leaves wind around their caps; between each mitred ogive is a cut-out rose; this gallery is the place where the prisoners take the air.
This is rendered almost certain by the proof of a continuance of business relations between the two places. The greater number of the big tombs of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. are of a peperino from Cave, and a good deal of the tufa used in wall construction in Praeneste is from the quarries near Cave, as Fernique saw.
Instead of closing the tomb, as was done in the other cases, this accomplished antiquarian, with the good taste for which he was distinguished, left it in the exact condition in which he had found it, so that it might be an object of interest to future visitors. Ascending the slope, we entered a long narrow passage about six feet wide and about fourteen feet deep cut through the tufa rock.
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