Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 1, 2025
In one place there is a huge brass monster, and devils are driving scores of lost souls into his mouth. Over hot fires hang caldrons with fifty or sixty people in each, and devils are poking the fires. People are hung up on hooks by their tongues, and devils are lashing them. Up in the right hand corner are some of the saved, with grins on their faces stretching from ear to ear.
But in the festival days of San Giuseppe, gayly ornamented booths are built at the corner of many of the streets, especially near the church in Capo le Case, in the Borgo, and at San Eustachio, which are adorned with great green branches as large as young trees, and hung with red and gold draperies, where the "Frittelle di San Giuseppe" are fried in huge caldrons of boiling oil and served out to the common people.
Every courtesy was shown them; and their hearts were lifted up, as they beheld approaching among the trees great caldrons of good soup; forest salads; red deer and roe roasted on the wood embers; spits of pheasants and partridges, larks and buntings, thrust off one by one by fair hands into the burdock leaves which served as platters; and last, but not least, jacks of ale and wine, appearing mysteriously from a cool old stone quarry.
Jurgis stood where the balcony of the theater would have been, and opposite, by the stage, he saw three giant caldrons, big enough for all the devils of hell to brew their broth in, full of something white and blinding, bubbling and splashing, roaring as if volcanoes were blowing through it one had to shout to be heard in the place.
In the early morning, when the lid of the public cistern in the centre of the campo was unlocked, there was a clamor of voices and a clangor of copper vessels, as the housewives of the neighborhood and the local force of strong-backed Frinlan water-girls drew their day's supply of water; and on that sort of special parochial holiday, called a sagra, the campo hummed and clattered and shrieked with a multitude celebrating the day around the stands where pumpkin seeds and roast pumpkin and anisette-water were sold, and before the movable kitchen where cakes were fried in caldrons of oil, and uproariously offered to the crowd by the cook, who did not suffer himself to be embarrassed by the rival drama of adjoining puppet-shows, but continued to bellow forth his bargains all day long and far into the night, when the flames under his kettles painted his visage a fine crimson.
The huntsmen with a thrice-repeated vivat, armed with spoons, ran up and assailed the kettle; the copper rang, the vapour burst forth, the bigos evaporated like camphor, it vanished and flew away; only in the jaws of the caldrons the steam still seethed, as in the craters of extinct volcanoes.
Veiled in the solemn music ushering the risen Saviour was a key-note to solve the darkest secrets of a world gone wrong, even this social riddle which the brain of the grimy puddler grappled with madly to-night. The men began to withdraw the metal from the caldrons.
Richard Coeur-de-Lion, when campaigning in Guyenne, may have sat down many a time to such a table as this, and to just such a meal as the one that is about to be served to the mowers, with the exception of the coffee and rum. Let us take a look into the great caldrons, which appear to have come out of Gargantua's kitchen.
Fire in every horrible form: pits of flame waving in the wind; liquid metal-flames writhing in tortuous streams through the sand; wide caldrons filled with boiling fire, over which bent ghastly wretches stirring the strange brewing; and through all, crowds of half-clad men, looking like revengeful ghosts in the red light, hurried, throwing masses of glittering fire. It was like a street in Hell.
Him followed wives and babes on two lean horses, whose flanks still rattled like parchment drum, being beaten by kettles and caldrons.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking