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Waterfalls dash through thickets of crimson foxglove, and daturas swing their fragrant bells over the dancing water. A little goatherd, leading his bleating flock, plays on a reed flute to summon a straggler from a distant crag. The brown figure, in linen waistcloth and yellow turban, suggests that Indian personality which has survived ages of exile on these lonely heights.
A mountain stream is turned into two large square reservoirs, where you can disport yourself under the shade of bananas and palm trees, while orange trees, daturas, poinsettias, and other plants, in full bloom, drop their fragrant flowers into the crystal water. There is also a nice little bathing-house, with a douche outside; and the general arrangements seem really perfect.
If it were summer time, the daturas would be covered with their great white floral trumpets, and every oleander bush would be one blaze of the coarse carmine blossoms that are here called Mazza di San Giuseppe, or St Joseph’s nosegay, and a very gaudy rank bouquet they make.
Wherever soil could get holding place upon the face of the cliff, wild flowers had burst forth and were thriving after their own lovely fashion. Here were daturas and daphnes mingled with heliotrope; the latter so overgrown as to be a small tree rather than a shrub.
Oaks and bamboos, blue gums and deodars, seem to flourish equally well within a yard or two of each other, and the more distant flower-beds are filled with an odd mixture of dahlias and daturas, white fleur-de-lis and bushy geraniums, scarlet euphorbias and verbenas. But the weeds! They are a chronic eyesore and grief to every gardener.
The complexion, though sun-burned, showed a marvellous delicacy in the texture of the skin. If, as Buffon declared, love lies in touch, the softness of the girl's skin must have had the penetrating and inciting influence of the fragrance of daturas.
Backed by gentle slopes well wooded and well tilled, and screened from the northern blasts by its guarding amphitheatre of grey crags, Salerno occupies a delightful position upon the Bay to which it gives its own name. The long stretch of its Marina, tolerably clean to the eye if not at all points agreeable to the nostrils, follows the broad curve of the strand, and an idle hour or so may pleasantly be whiled away in watching the fishing craft moored beside the mole and the attendant sailors. At the northern end of this promenade, in what constitutes the most fashionable quarter of the place, is a tiny garden with palms and daturas, whilst hard by stands a large theatre, evidences of the gentility of modern Salerno. But the whole town appears sleepy and dead-alive to a stranger, though at the sunset hour a band occasionally plays in this open space, the music attracting hither a crowd composed of all the divers elements of society in the quiet old city. Yet though not possessing any great attractions for a sojourn in itself, Salerno makes an excellent centre whence to explore the neighbourhood, for it lies within easy reach of the great Benedictine Abbey of Santa Trinit
Our road to this city of decadence leads gradually downward, through a broad, sinking moorland, covered with weeds and wild flowers rich, monotonous, desolate. The broidery of pink flax and yellow chrysanthemums and white marguerites still follows us; but now the wider stretches of thistles and burdocks and daturas and cockleburs and water-plantains seem to be more important.
Thick-set daturas spread out purplish horns, from which insects, weary of life, sucked fatal poison. Marigolds buried with choking foliage their writhing starry flowers, that already reeked of putrefaction. And there were other melancholy flowers also: fleshy ranunculi with rusty tints, hyacinths and tuberoses that exhaled asphyxia and died from their own perfume.
Round the Indian cottages were cactuses with splendid crimson flowers, daturas with brilliant white blossoms, palm- and fruit-trees of fifty kinds. We stopped at one of the cottages, and bought an armadillo that had just been caught in the woods close by, while routing among his favourite ants' nests.
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