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Updated: July 3, 2025
"Wait here for me," said Maximilian, as he passed me. I sat down. The cowled figures remained seated around the walls. Not a sound broke the profound silence. I could see that all eyes were fixed upon the door by which the Executive Committee had left us, and my own were riveted there also. We all felt the gravity of the occasion. Five minutes ten minutes fifteen minutes twenty minutes passed.
For above them hung the mountains, cowled with fog, and seamed with storm; and around them desolation; and below their feet the grave. Hence they went, with all goodwill; and vowed for ever afterwards that fear of a simple place like that was only too ridiculous.
The next day the guest was a monk who talked literature, and spoke a thousand follies against Voltaire, whom I then much admired, and against the "Esprit des Lois," a favourite work of mine, which the cowled idiot refused to attribute to Montesquieu, maintaining it had been written by a monk. He might as well have said that a Capuchin created the heavens and the earth.
Half an hour later the party for Chad were riding quietly homeward through the forest with two cowled monks in their company. The last charge to these from the prior had been: "Thou, Brother Fabian, keep a sharp eye by night and by day upon the boys; and thou, Brother Nathaniel, upon the knight and his lady.
In the early morning of 4th September a whale-boat manned by natives dragged us down the green lane of the anchorage and round the spouting promontory. On the shore level it was a hot, breathless, and yet crystal morning; but high overhead the hills of Atuona were all cowled in cloud, and the ocean-river of the trades streamed without pause.
The shadows all about were black and mysterious enough, but they were too tired to be troubled about them, and were already half-way down a staircase, when the signora looked back, and, if she had not seized the balustrade, would have fallen; for standing at the head of the staircase was a white figure, holding a taper above a cowled head, out of which a pair of dark eyes was looking at her steadfastly.
The old gateway wept to see the cowled Black Canons depart when Henry VIII dissolved the monastery; its heart nearly broke when it heard the sounds of axes and hammers, crowbars and saws, at work on the fabric of the church pulling down the grand nave, and it scowled at the new owner, Sir Richard Rich, a prosperous political adventurer, who bought the whole estate for £1064 11s. 3d., and made a good bargain.
He pointed out the traitor here, the traitor there; and in one or two cases he did so with a mildness that made those fret at their beards vaguely who understood his character. Barto Rizzo was, it was said, born in a village near Forli, in the dominions of the Pope; according to the rumour, he was the child of a veiled woman and a cowled paternity.
The mountains rose sheer from every side, heaving their gigantic crests far up into the night, the black peaks crowding together, and looking now less like beasts than like a company of cowled giants. In the daytime they were silent; but at night they seemed to stir and rouse themselves. Occasionally the stamp-mill stopped, its thunder ceasing abruptly.
In the church the little children play about among the groups of mothers with orange kerchiefs on their heads and heavy silver rings on every finger. Strange processions with cowled faces and crucifix and banners borne aloft sweep into the piazza and up the church steps. Old women with Sibyl-like faces sit spinning at their doors.
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