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Again somewhere to the west of Clusium, before we reached the Pallia, we again dispersed. We struck the Clodian Highway about halfway between Clusium and the Pallia. From there we proceeded like ordinary footfarers.
The curtain of an early autumnal morning was everywhere lifted around the Motterone, save for one milky strip of cloud that lay lizard-like across the throat of Monte Boscero facing it, when a party of five footfarers, who had met from different points of ascent some way below, and were climbing the mountain together, stood upon the cropped herbage of the second plateau, and stopped to eye the landscape; possibly also to get their breath.
It had been easy enough to pass ourselves off for farmerly cattle-buyers in the Umbrian Mountains. But, habited as we were, camped in the depths of a thick, swampy forest, we were sure to be suspected of being runaway slaves by anyone who encountered us; and such gentry as organize big hunts with swarms of beaters are always prone to suspect any footfarers of being runaway slaves.
Footfarers were few, except on the north side of Coventry Street, where officers, soldiers, civilians, police and courtesans marched eternally to and fro, peering at one another in the thick gloom that, except in the immediate region of a lamp, put all girls, the young and the ageing, the pretty and the ugly, the good-natured and the grasping, on a sinister enticing equality.
'Yes, said he, rubbing his hands, 'excellent! making due allowances for the emphatically commoner's mind we have to deal with. And then to change the subject he dilated on that strange story of the man who, an enormous number of years back in the date of the world's history, carried his little son on his shoulders one night when the winds were not so boisterous, though we were deeper in Winter, along the identical road we traversed, between the gorsemounds, across the heaths, with yonder remembered fir-tree clump in sight and the waste-water visible to footfarers rounding under the firs.
'Yes, said he, rubbing his hands, 'excellent! making due allowances for the emphatically commoner's mind we have to deal with. And then to change the subject he dilated on that strange story of the man who, an enormous number of years back in the date of the world's history, carried his little son on his shoulders one night when the winds were not so boisterous, though we were deeper in Winter, along the identical road we traversed, between the gorsemounds, across the heaths, with yonder remembered fir-tree clump in sight and the waste-water visible to footfarers rounding under the firs.
I could not deny that they were brilliantly conceived. Almost equally brilliant I thought his management of his expedition. From where I joined it, near the crest of the Apennines, somewhere between the head-waters of the Trebia and the Nura, we advanced on Rome as rapidly as footfarers could travel.
Railway trains, cabs, coloured omnibuses, cyclists, and footfarers mingled in and complicated the scene. Then the first ocean-going steamer appeared, belittling all else. And then the calm, pale beauty of the custom-house at last humbled George, and for an instant made him think that he could never do anything worth doing. His pride leapt up, unconquerable.
Our store of gems in our amulet-bags was of no use, because, as he said, he was personally known to every gem-expert in Rome. Perusia was the nearest town to northward where he might hope to find prompt secret buyers for gems of dubious ownership; Perusia was far beyond the reach of two footfarers, without wallets and with only seven denarii.
The curtain of an early autumnal morning was everywhere lifted around the Motterone, save for one milky strip of cloud that lay lizard-like across the throat of Monte Boscero facing it, when a party of five footfarers, who had met from different points of ascent some way below, and were climbing the mountain together, stood upon the cropped herbage of the second plateau, and stopped to eye the landscape; possibly also to get their breath.
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