The female eagle which yet remained had apparently been waiting for the same chance to get at the face of the nest-robber; for the very instant he stirred she swooped down upon his exposed countenance and struck her claws into it. Ulf gave a shriek so wild and piteous that it would have touched a heart of stone. And Peer’s heart, which was a very soft and compassionate one, was moved in its very depth. He could not leave a human creature, whether friend or foe, in such a terrible plight. Striking out with his sickle, he bent the top of the birch towards him and pulled himself down on the rocky ledge, planting his feet within a few inches of the nest. The eagle, thinking that it had to deal with another nest-robber, rushed furiously at him, beating with its big wings and scratching with its talons. If Peer had not clutched the birch so tightly with his left hand he would have been knocked down, and would have swung out into the air, where the eagle could have wheeled and whirled him about until he grew too dizzy to fight. But now he had a fairly good foothold, and his back was shielded by the cliff against which he was leaning. With his sharp sickle he guarded his face and eyes right manfully; but his clothes were torn into shreds, and he felt the warm blood trickling down his right leg, in which the bird’s claws had made an ugly gash.
Fully ten minutes the combat had lasted, when he heard an anxious voice calling his name from above, and saw his father’s face hanging out over the edge of the precipice.
“Don’t pull up yet,” he cried.
At that very instant the eagle dashed forward and made a lunge at the arm which held the birch-tree. Quick as lightning the boy plunged the point of his weapon deep into its breast. The huge bird gave a long plaintive croak, and tumbled, with feebly flapping wings, down into the dark ravine.
Peer, as soon as he had collected his senses, brushed the dirt and many feathers from his face, and cautiously crept along the edge of the cliff to where his enemy was lying. He stooped over him and gently shook him by the shoulder. Ulf gave a groan, but did not stir. Once more be touched him, but Ulf only buried his face more deeply in the grass, and moaned.
“You needn’t be afraid. I haven’t come to hurt you.”
Then, quivering like an aspen leaf, the wounded boy timidly raised his head. But oh, the pity of it! Peer had to turn away from the sickening sight. Where Ulf’s right eye had been there was but a hollow. His rescuer, however, pulled himself quickly together, doffed his belt and buckled it about Ulf’s waist. Then he gave the signal to his father, and up went his foe—slowly, slowly, until he was warily lifted over the edge of the precipice. Then a loud shout was heard, and the sound of terror or of impotent rage. Peer was indeed half afraid that he might see Ulf come spinning through the air and vanish among the pines at the bottom of the gulch.
A few minutes sufficed, however, to reassure him on this point. But the gash in his leg now began to pain him, and his boot was full of blood. He felt a trifle light-headed, and concluded it was high time to bandage the wound. The odour of decayed bones about the eagle’s nest made him sick; but as there was no other secure place on the ledge, he had no choice but to sit down right in the nest, having first killed with his sickle the remaining eaglet. As it would have to starve without the old birds, it seemed more merciful to dispatch it now. Tearing the lining out of his waistcoat, he made a bandage which he tied tightly about the wound. He had scarcely finished this operation when a strange faintness seized him. His head was in a whirl. He seemed to see the rope with his belt attached dangling a couple of feet beyond him, but he did not dare rise, feeling sure that he would plunge straight into the abyss. After a while there were two ropes and two belts, and a queer sound of rushing wing-beats filled the air. Then earth and sky flowed together, and all things were blurred by a luminous mist, through which aerial voices broke, calling his name, with a wonderful echoing resonance.
He fancied he must have slept for a long while. When he woke up his father was bending over him, fastening the belt about his waist; and presently he felt himself rising—rising, and at last lifted bodily up, whereupon a woman, who seemed to be his mother, flung herself over him, crying and hot tears dripped upon his face. In a few minutes his father was also there, with two strange men; but Ulf, whom he had rescued, he could discover nowhere.
It was one evening about three weeks after the battle that Peer, now fully restored to health, was rambling over the fields in the neighbourhood of his father’s cottage. Suddenly, at the edge of the forest, Little Ulf, with his right eye bandaged, stepped out of the underbrush and grabbed him by the hand.
“Peer,” he said, huskily, “I’ve been mean to you, and I know it. I sha’n’t be in your way anymore. A one-eyed chap ain’t much good, I reckon, for a wild-hayman. But I would rather lose the eye I’ve got left than I would forget one thing—that I owe my life to you, whose life I did my best to ruin.”
DOWN THROUGH ITALY BY RAIL
MARK TWAIN
Some of the Quaker City’s passengers had arrived in Venice from Switzerland and other lands before we left there, and others were expected every day. We heard of no casualties among them and no sickness.
We were a little fatigued with sightseeing, and so we rattled through a good deal of country by rail without caring to stop. I took few notes. I find no mention of Bologna in my memorandum book, except that we arrived there in good season, but saw none of the sausages for which the place is so justly celebrated.
Pistoria awoke but a passing interest.
Florence pleased us for a while. I think we appreciated the great figure of David in the grand square, and the sculptured group they call the Rape of the Sabines. We wandered through the endless collections of paintings and statues of the Pitti and Ufizzi galleries, of course. I make that statement in self defense: there let it stop. I could not rest under the imputation that I visited Florence and did not traverse its weary miles of picture galleries. We tried indolently to recollect something about the Guelphs and Ghibellines and the other historical cutthroats whose quarrels and assassinations make up so large a share of Florentine history, but the subject was not attractive. We had been robbed of all the fine mountain scenery on our little journey by a system of rail roading that had three miles of tunnel to a hundred yards of daylight, and we were not inclined to be sociable with Florence. We had seen the spot, outside the city somewhere, where these people had allowed the bones of Galileo to rest in unconsecrated ground for an age because his great discovery that the world turned around was regarded as a damning heresy by the Church; and we know that long after the world had accepted his theory and raised his name high in the list of its great men, they had still let him rot there. That we had lived to see his dust in honored sepulture in the Church of Santa Croce we owed to a society of literati, and not to Florence or her rulers. We saw Dante’s tomb in that church also, but we were glad to know that his body was not in it; that the ungrateful city that had exiled him and persecuted him would give much to have it there, but need not hope to ever secure that high honor to herself. Medicis are good enough for Florence. Let her plant Medicis and build grand monuments over them to testify how gratefully she was wont to lick the hand that scourged her.
Magnanimous Florence! Her jewelry marts are filled with artists in mosaic. Florentine mosaics are the choicest in all the world. Florence loves to have that said. Florence is proud of it. Florence would foster this specialty of hers. She is grateful to the artists that bring to her this high credit and fill her coffers with foreign money, and so she encourages them with pensions. With pensions! Think of the lavishness of it. She knows that people who piece together the beautiful trifles die early because the labor is so confining and so exhausting to hand and brain, and so she has decreed that all these people who reach the age of sixty shall have a pension after that! I have not heard that any of them have called for their dividends yet. One man did fight along till he was sixty and started after his pension, but it appeared that there had been a mistake of a year in his family record, and so he gave it up and died.
&nbs
p; These artists will take particles of stone or glass no larger than a mustard seed, and piece them together on a sleeve button or a shirt stud, so smoothly and with such nice adjustment of the delicate shades of color the pieces bear as to form a pygmy rose with stem, thorn, leaves, petals complete, and all as softly and as truthfully tinted as though Nature had builded it herself. They will counterfeit a fly or a high-toned bug or the ruined Coliseum, within the cramped circle of a breast pin, and do it so deftly and a neatly that any man might think a master painted it.
I saw a little table in the great mosaic school in Florence—a little trifle of a center table—whose top was made of some sort of precious polished stone, and in the stone was inlaid the figure of a flute, with bell mouth and a mazy complication of keys. No painting in the world could have been softer or richer; no shading out of one tint into another could have been more perfect; no work of art of any kind could have been more faultless than this flute, and yet to count the multitude of little fragments of stone of which they swore it was formed would bankrupt any man’s arithmetic! I do not think one could have seen where two particles joined each other with eyes of ordinary shrewdness. Certainly we could detect no such blemish. This tabletop cost the labor of one man for ten long years, so they said, and it was for sale for thirty-five thousand dollars.
We went to the Church of Santa Croce, from time to time, in Florence, to weep over the tombs of Michelangelo, Raphael, and Machiavelli (I suppose they are buried there, but it may be that they reside elsewhere and rent their tombs to other parties—such being the fashion in Italy), and between times we used to go and stand on the bridges and admire the Arno. It is popular to admire the Arno. It is a great historical creek with four feet in the channel and some scows floating around. It would be a very plausible river if they would pump some water into it. They all call it a river, and they honestly think it is a river, do these dark and bloody Florentines. They even help out the delusion by building bridges over it. I do not see why they are too good to wade.
How the fatigues and annoyances of travel fill one with bitter prejudices sometimes! I might enter Florence under happier auspices a month hence and find it all beautiful, all attractive. But I do not care to think of it now at all, nor of its roomy shops filled to the ceiling with snowy marble and alabaster copies of all the celebrated sculptures in Europe—copies so enchanting to the eye that I wonder how they can really be shaped like the dingy petrified nightmares they are the portraits of. I got lost in Florence at nine o’clock one night, and stayed lost in that labyrinth of narrow streets and long rows of vast buildings that look all alike until toward three o’clock in the morning. It was a pleasant night and at first there were a good many people abroad, and there were cheerful lights about. Later I grew accustomed to prowling about mysterious drifts and tunnels and astonishing and interesting myself with coming around corners expecting to find the hotel staring me in the face, and not finding it doing anything of the kind. Later still, I felt tired. I soon felt remarkably tired. But there was no one abroad now—not even a policeman. I walked till I was out of all patience and very hot and thirsty. At last, somewhere after one o’clock, I came unexpectedly to one of the city gates. I knew then that I was very far from the hotel. The soldiers thought I wanted to leave the city, and they sprang up and barred the way with their muskets. I said:
“Hotel d’Europe!”
It was all the Italian I knew, and I was not certain whether that was Italian or French. The soldiers looked stupidly at each other and at me, and shook their heads and took me into custody. I said I wanted to go home. They did not understand me. They took me into the guardhouse and searched me, but they found no sedition on me. They found a small piece of soap (we carry soap with us now), and I made them a present of it, seeing that they regarded it as a curiosity. I continued to say Hotel d’Europe and they continued to shake their heads, until at last a young soldier nodding in the corner roused up and said something. He said he knew where the hotel was, I suppose, for the officer of the guard sent him away with me. We walked a hundred or a hundred and fifty miles, it appeared to me, and then he got lost. He turned this way and that, and finally gave it up and signified that he was going to spend the remainder of the morning trying to find the city gate again. At that moment it struck me that there was something familiar about the house over the way. It was the hotel!
It was a happy thing for me that there happened to be a soldier there that knew even as much as he did; for they say that the policy of the government is to change the soldiery from one place to another constantly and from country to city, so that they cannot become acquainted with the people and grow lax in their duties and enter into plots and conspiracies with friends. My experiences of Florence were chiefly unpleasant. I will change the subject.
At Pisa we climbed up to the top of the strangest structure the world has any knowledge of—the Leaning Tower. As everyone knows, it is in the neighborhood of one hundred and eighty feet high—and I beg to observe that one hundred and eighty feet reach to about the height of four ordinary three story buildings piled one on top of the other and is a very considerable altitude for a tower of uniform thickness to aspire to, even when it stands upright, yet this one leans more than thirteen feet out of the perpendicular. It is seven hundred years old, but neither history or tradition say whether it was built as it is purposely or whether one of its side has settled. There is no record that it ever stood straight up. It is built of marble. It is an airy and a beautiful structure, and each of its eight stories is encircled by fluted columns, some of marble and some of granite, with Corinthian capitals that were handsome when they were new. It is a bell tower, and in its top hangs a chime of ancient bells. The winding staircase within is dark, but one always knows which side of the tower he is on because of his naturally gravitating from one side to the other of the staircase with the rise or dip of the tower. Some of the stones steps are footworn only on one end; others only on the other end; others only in the middle. To look down into the tower from the top is like looking down into a tilted well. A rope that hangs from the center of the top touches the wall before it reaches the bottom. Standing on the summit, one does not feel altogether comfortable when he looks down from the high side; but to crawl on your breast to the verge on the lower side and try to stretch your neck out far enough to see the base of the tower makes your flesh creep, and convinces you for a single moment, in spite of all your philosophy, that the building is falling. You handle yourself very carefully all the time, under the silly impression that if it is not falling, your trifling weight will start it unless you are particular not to “bear down” on it.
The Duomo, close at hand, is one of the finest cathedrals in Europe. It is eight hundred years old. Its grandeur has out-lived the high commercial prosperity and the political importance that made it a necessity, or rather, a possibility. Surrounded by poverty, decay, and ruin, it conveys to us a more tangible impression of the former greatness of Pisa than books could give us.
The Baptistery, which is a few years older than the Leaning Tower, is a stately rotunda of huge dimensions, and was a costly structure. In it hangs the lamp whose measured swing suggested to Galileo the pendulum. It looked an insignificant thing to have conferred upon the world of science and mechanics such a mighty extension of their dominions as it has. Pondering, in its suggestive presence, I seemed to see a crazy universe of swinging disks, the toiling children of this sedate parent. He appeared to have an intelligent expression about him of knowing that he was not a lamp at all; that he was a Pendulum; a pendulum disguised, for prodigious and inscrutable purposes of his own deep devising, and not a common pendulum either, but the old original patriarchal Pendulum—the Abraham Pendulum of the world.
This Baptistery is endowed with the most pleasing echo of all the echoes we have read of. The guide sounded two sonorous notes, about half an octave apart; the echo answered with the most enchanting, the most melodious, the richest blending of sweet sounds that one can imag
ine. It was like a long-drawn chord of a church organ, infinitely softened by distance. I may be extravagant in this matter, but if this be the case my ear is to blame—not my pen. I am describing a memory—and one that will remain long with me.
The peculiar devotional spirit of the olden time, which placed a higher confidence in outward forms of worship than in the watchful guarding of the heart against sinful thoughts and the hands against sinful deeds, and which believed in the protecting virtues of inanimate objects made holy by contact with holy things, is illustrated in a striking manner in one of the cemeteries of Pisa. The tombs are set in soil brought in ships from the Holy Land ages ago. To be buried in such ground was regarded by the ancient Pisans as being more potent for salvation than many masses purchased of the Church and the vowing of many candles to the Virgin.
Pisa is believed to be about three thousand years old. It was one of the twelve great cities of ancient Etruria, that commonwealth which has left so many monuments in testimony of its extraordinary advancement and so little history of itself that is tangible and comprehensible. A Pisan antiquarian gave me an ancient tear jug which he averred was full four thousand years old. It was found among the ruins of one of the oldest of the Etruscan cities. He said it came from a tomb, and was used by some bereaved family in that remote age when even the pyramids of Egypt were young. Damascas a village, Abraham a prattling infant, and ancient Troy not yet dreamt of, to receive the tears wept for some lost idol of a household. It spoke to us in a language of its own; and with a pathos more tender than any words might bring, its mute eloquence swept down the long roll of the centuries with its tale of a vacant chair, a familiar footstep missed from the threshold, a pleasant voice gone from the chorus, a vanished form!—a tale which is always so new to us, so startling, so terrible, so benumbing to the senses, and behold how threadbare and old it is! No shrewdly worded history could have brought the myths and shadows of that old dreamy age before us clothed with human flesh and warmed with human sympathies so vividly as did this poor little unsentient vessel of pottery.
The Best Adventure and Exploration Stories Ever Told Page 47
