The Entire Project Gutenberg Works of Mark Twain

M >> Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) >> The Entire Project Gutenberg Works of Mark Twain


As I go back in spirit and recall that noble sea, reposing among the
snow-peaks six thousand feet above the ocean, the conviction comes strong
upon me again that Como would only seem a bedizened little courtier in
that august presence.

Sorrow and misfortune overtake the legislature that still from year to
year permits Tahoe to retain its unmusical cognomen! Tahoe! It suggests
no crystal waters, no picturesque shores, no sublimity. Tahoe for a sea
in the clouds: a sea that has character and asserts it in solemn calms at
times, at times in savage storms; a sea whose royal seclusion is guarded
by a cordon of sentinel peaks that lift their frosty fronts nine thousand
feet above the level world; a sea whose every aspect is impressive, whose
belongings are all beautiful, whose lonely majesty types the Deity!

Tahoe means grasshoppers. It means grasshopper soup. It is Indian, and
suggestive of Indians. They say it is Pi-ute--possibly it is Digger.
I am satisfied it was named by the Diggers--those degraded savages who
roast their dead relatives, then mix the human grease and ashes of bones
with tar, and "gaum" it thick all over their heads and foreheads and
ears, and go caterwauling about the hills and call it mourning. These
are the gentry that named the Lake.

People say that Tahoe means "Silver Lake"--"Limpid Water"--"Falling
Leaf." Bosh. It means grasshopper soup, the favorite dish of the Digger
tribe,--and of the Pi-utes as well. It isn't worth while, in these
practical times, for people to talk about Indian poetry--there never was
any in them--except in the Fenimore Cooper Indians. But they are an
extinct tribe that never existed. I know the Noble Red Man. I have
camped with the Indians; I have been on the warpath with them, taken part
in the chase with them--for grasshoppers; helped them steal cattle; I
have roamed with them, scalped them, had them for breakfast. I would
gladly eat the whole race if I had a chance.

But I am growing unreliable. I will return to my comparison of the
lakes. Como is a little deeper than Tahoe, if people here tell the
truth. They say it is eighteen hundred feet deep at this point, but it
does not look a dead enough blue for that. Tahoe is one thousand five
hundred and twenty-five feet deep in the centre, by the state geologist's
measurement. They say the great peak opposite this town is five thousand
feet high: but I feel sure that three thousand feet of that statement is
a good honest lie. The lake is a mile wide, here, and maintains about
that width from this point to its northern extremity--which is distant
sixteen miles: from here to its southern extremity--say fifteen miles--it
is not over half a mile wide in any place, I should think. Its snow-clad
mountains one hears so much about are only seen occasionally, and then in
the distance, the Alps. Tahoe is from ten to eighteen miles wide, and
its mountains shut it in like a wall. Their summits are never free from
snow the year round. One thing about it is very strange: it never has
even a skim of ice upon its surface, although lakes in the same range of
mountains, lying in a lower and warmer temperature, freeze over in
winter.

It is cheerful to meet a shipmate in these out-of-the-way places and
compare notes with him. We have found one of ours here--an old soldier
of the war, who is seeking bloodless adventures and rest from his
campaigns in these sunny lands.--[Colonel J. HERON FOSTER, editor of a
Pittsburgh journal, and a most estimable gentleman. As these sheets are
being prepared for the press I am pained to learn of his decease shortly
after his return home--M.T.]



CHAPTER XXI.

We voyaged by steamer down the Lago di Lecco, through wild mountain
scenery, and by hamlets and villas, and disembarked at the town of Lecco.
They said it was two hours, by carriage to the ancient city of Bergamo,
and that we would arrive there in good season for the railway train. We
got an open barouche and a wild, boisterous driver, and set out. It was
delightful. We had a fast team and a perfectly smooth road. There were
towering cliffs on our left, and the pretty Lago di Lecco on our right,
and every now and then it rained on us. Just before starting, the driver
picked up, in the street, a stump of a cigar an inch long, and put it in
his mouth. When he had carried it thus about an hour, I thought it would
be only Christian charity to give him a light. I handed him my cigar,
which I had just lit, and he put it in his mouth and returned his stump
to his pocket! I never saw a more sociable man. At least I never saw a
man who was more sociable on a short acquaintance.

We saw interior Italy, now. The houses were of solid stone, and not
often in good repair. The peasants and their children were idle, as a
general thing, and the donkeys and chickens made themselves at home in
drawing-room and bed-chamber and were not molested. The drivers of each
and every one of the slow-moving market-carts we met were stretched in
the sun upon their merchandise, sound a sleep. Every three or four
hundred yards, it seemed to me, we came upon the shrine of some saint or
other--a rude picture of him built into a huge cross or a stone pillar by
the road-side.--Some of the pictures of the Saviour were curiosities in
their way. They represented him stretched upon the cross, his
countenance distorted with agony. From the wounds of the crown of
thorns; from the pierced side; from the mutilated hands and feet; from
the scourged body--from every hand-breadth of his person streams of blood
were flowing! Such a gory, ghastly spectacle would frighten the children
out of their senses, I should think. There were some unique auxiliaries
to the painting which added to its spirited effect. These were genuine
wooden and iron implements, and were prominently disposed round about the
figure: a bundle of nails; the hammer to drive them; the sponge; the reed
that supported it; the cup of vinegar; the ladder for the ascent of the
cross; the spear that pierced the Saviour's side. The crown of thorns
was made of real thorns, and was nailed to the sacred head. In some
Italian church-paintings, even by the old masters, the Saviour and the
Virgin wear silver or gilded crowns that are fastened to the pictured
head with nails. The effect is as grotesque as it is incongruous.

Here and there, on the fronts of roadside inns, we found huge, coarse
frescoes of suffering martyrs like those in the shrines. It could not
have diminished their sufferings any to be so uncouthly represented.
We were in the heart and home of priest craft--of a happy, cheerful,
contented ignorance, superstition, degradation, poverty, indolence, and
everlasting unaspiring worthlessness. And we said fervently: it suits
these people precisely; let them enjoy it, along with the other animals,
and Heaven forbid that they be molested. We feel no malice toward these
fumigators.

We passed through the strangest, funniest, undreampt-of old towns, wedded
to the customs and steeped in the dreams of the elder ages, and perfectly
unaware that the world turns round! And perfectly indifferent, too, as
to whether it turns around or stands still. They have nothing to do but
eat and sleep and sleep and eat, and toil a little when they can get a
friend to stand by and keep them awake. They are not paid for thinking
--they are not paid to fret about the world's concerns. They were not
respectable people--they were not worthy people--they were not learned
and wise and brilliant people--but in their breasts, all their stupid
lives long, resteth a peace that passeth understanding! How can men,
calling themselves men, consent to be so degraded and happy.

We whisked by many a gray old medieval castle, clad thick with ivy that
swung its green banners down from towers and turrets where once some old
Crusader's flag had floated. The driver pointed to one of these ancient
fortresses, and said, (I translate):

"Do you see that great iron hook that projects from the wall just under
the highest window in the ruined tower?"

We said we could not see it at such a distance, but had no doubt it was
there.

"Well," he said; "there is a legend connected with that iron hook.
Nearly seven hundred years ago, that castle was the property of the noble
Count Luigi Gennaro Guido Alphonso di Genova----"

"What was his other name?" said Dan.

"He had no other name. The name I have spoken was all the name he had.
He was the son of----"

"Poor but honest parents--that is all right--never mind the particulars
--go on with the legend."

THE LEGEND.

Well, then, all the world, at that time, was in a wild excitement about
the Holy Sepulchre. All the great feudal lords in Europe were pledging
their lands and pawning their plate to fit out men-at-arms so that they
might join the grand armies of Christendom and win renown in the Holy
Wars. The Count Luigi raised money, like the rest, and one mild
September morning, armed with battle-ax, portcullis and thundering
culverin, he rode through the greaves and bucklers of his donjon-keep
with as gallant a troop of Christian bandits as ever stepped in Italy.
He had his sword, Excalibur, with him. His beautiful countess and her
young daughter waved him a tearful adieu from the battering-rams and
buttresses of the fortress, and he galloped away with a happy heart.

He made a raid on a neighboring baron and completed his outfit with the
booty secured. He then razed the castle to the ground, massacred the
family and moved on. They were hardy fellows in the grand old days of
chivalry. Alas! Those days will never come again.

Count Luigi grew high in fame in Holy Land. He plunged into the carnage
of a hundred battles, but his good Excalibur always brought him out
alive, albeit often sorely wounded. His face became browned by exposure
to the Syrian sun in long marches; he suffered hunger and thirst; he
pined in prisons, he languished in loathsome plague-hospitals. And many
and many a time he thought of his loved ones at home, and wondered if all
was well with them. But his heart said, Peace, is not thy brother
watching over thy household?

* * * * * * *

Forty-two years waxed and waned; the good fight was won; Godfrey reigned
in Jerusalem--the Christian hosts reared the banner of the cross above
the Holy Sepulchre!

Twilight was approaching. Fifty harlequins, in flowing robes, approached
this castle wearily, for they were on foot, and the dust upon their
garments betokened that they had traveled far. They overtook a peasant,
and asked him if it were likely they could get food and a hospitable bed
there, for love of Christian charity, and if perchance, a moral parlor
entertainment might meet with generous countenance--"for," said they,
"this exhibition hath no feature that could offend the most fastidious
taste."

"Marry," quoth the peasant, "an' it please your worships, ye had better
journey many a good rood hence with your juggling circus than trust your
bones in yonder castle."

"How now, sirrah!" exclaimed the chief monk, "explain thy ribald speech,
or by'r Lady it shall go hard with thee."

"Peace, good mountebank, I did but utter the truth that was in my heart.
San Paolo be my witness that did ye but find the stout Count Leonardo in
his cups, sheer from the castle's topmost battlements would he hurl ye
all! Alack-a-day, the good Lord Luigi reigns not here in these sad
times."

"The good Lord Luigi?"

"Aye, none other, please your worship. In his day, the poor rejoiced in
plenty and the rich he did oppress; taxes were not known, the fathers of
the church waxed fat upon his bounty; travelers went and came, with none
to interfere; and whosoever would, might tarry in his halls in cordial
welcome, and eat his bread and drink his wine, withal. But woe is me!
some two and forty years agone the good count rode hence to fight for
Holy Cross, and many a year hath flown since word or token have we had of
him. Men say his bones lie bleaching in the fields of Palestine."

"And now?"

"Now! God 'a mercy, the cruel Leonardo lords it in the castle. He
wrings taxes from the poor; he robs all travelers that journey by his
gates; he spends his days in feuds and murders, and his nights in revel
and debauch; he roasts the fathers of the church upon his kitchen spits,
and enjoyeth the same, calling it pastime. These thirty years Luigi's
countess hath not been seen by any [he] in all this land, and many
whisper that she pines in the dungeons of the castle for that she will
not wed with Leonardo, saying her dear lord still liveth and that she
will die ere she prove false to him. They whisper likewise that her
daughter is a prisoner as well. Nay, good jugglers, seek ye refreshment
other wheres. 'Twere better that ye perished in a Christian way than
that ye plunged from off yon dizzy tower. Give ye good-day."

"God keep ye, gentle knave--farewell."

But heedless of the peasant's warning, the players moved straightway
toward the castle.

Word was brought to Count Leonardo that a company of mountebanks besought
his hospitality.

"'Tis well. Dispose of them in the customary manner. Yet stay! I have
need of them. Let them come hither. Later, cast them from the
battlements--or--how many priests have ye on hand?"

"The day's results are meagre, good my lord. An abbot and a dozen
beggarly friars is all we have."

"Hell and furies! Is the estate going to seed? Send hither the
mountebanks. Afterward, broil them with the priests."

The robed and close-cowled harlequins entered. The grim Leonardo sate in
state at the head of his council board. Ranged up and down the hall on
either hand stood near a hundred men-at-arms.

"Ha, villains!" quoth the count, "What can ye do to earn the hospitality
ye crave."

"Dread lord and mighty, crowded audiences have greeted our humble efforts
with rapturous applause. Among our body count we the versatile and
talented Ugolino; the justly celebrated Rodolpho; the gifted and
accomplished Roderigo; the management have spared neither pains nor
expense--"

"S'death! What can ye do? Curb thy prating tongue."

"Good my lord, in acrobatic feats, in practice with the dumb-bells, in
balancing and ground and lofty tumbling are we versed--and sith your
highness asketh me, I venture here to publish that in the truly marvelous
and entertaining Zampillaerostation--"

"Gag him! throttle him! Body of Bacchus! am I a dog that I am to be
assailed with polysyllabled blasphemy like to this? But hold! Lucretia,
Isabel, stand forth! Sirrah, behold this dame, this weeping wench. The
first I marry, within the hour; the other shall dry her tears or feed the
vultures. Thou and thy vagabonds shall crown the wedding with thy
merry-makings. Fetch hither the priest!"

The dame sprang toward the chief player.

"O, save me!" she cried; "save me from a fate far worse than death!
Behold these sad eyes, these sunken cheeks, this withered frame! See
thou the wreck this fiend hath made, and let thy heart be moved with
pity! Look upon this damosel; note her wasted form, her halting step,
her bloomless cheeks where youth should blush and happiness exult in
smiles! Hear us and have compassion. This monster was my husband's
brother. He who should have been our shield against all harm, hath kept
us shut within the noisome caverns of his donjon-keep for lo these thirty
years. And for what crime? None other than that I would not belie my
troth, root out my strong love for him who marches with the legions of
the cross in Holy Land, (for O, he is not dead!) and wed with him! Save
us, O, save thy persecuted suppliants!"

She flung herself at his feet and clasped his knees.

"Ha!-ha!-ha!" shouted the brutal Leonardo. "Priest, to thy work!" and
he dragged the weeping dame from her refuge. "Say, once for all, will
you be mine?--for by my halidome, that breath that uttereth thy refusal
shall be thy last on earth!"

"NE-VER?"

"Then die!" and the sword leaped from its scabbard.

Quicker than thought, quicker than the lightning's flash, fifty monkish
habits disappeared, and fifty knights in splendid armor stood revealed!
fifty falchions gleamed in air above the men-at-arms, and brighter,
fiercer than them all, flamed Excalibur aloft, and cleaving downward
struck the brutal Leonardo's weapon from his grasp!

"A Luigi to the rescue! Whoop!"

"A Leonardo! 'tare an ouns!'"

"Oh, God, Oh, God, my husband!"

"Oh, God, Oh, God, my wife!"

"My father!"

"My precious!" [Tableau.]
===
Count Luigi bound his usurping brother hand and foot. The practiced
knights from Palestine made holyday sport of carving the awkward
men-at-arms into chops and steaks. The victory was complete. Happiness
reigned. The knights all married the daughter. Joy! wassail! finis!

"But what did they do with the wicked brother?"

"Oh nothing--only hanged him on that iron hook I was speaking of. By the
chin."

"As how?"

"Passed it up through his gills into his mouth."

"Leave him there?"

"Couple of years."

"Ah--is--is he dead?"

"Six hundred and fifty years ago, or such a matter."

"Splendid legend--splendid lie--drive on."

We reached the quaint old fortified city of Bergamo, the renowned in
history, some three-quarters of an hour before the train was ready to
start. The place has thirty or forty thousand inhabitants and is
remarkable for being the birthplace of harlequin. When we discovered
that, that legend of our driver took to itself a new interest in our
eyes.

Rested and refreshed, we took the rail happy and contented. I shall not
tarry to speak of the handsome Lago di Gardi; its stately castle that
holds in its stony bosom the secrets of an age so remote that even
tradition goeth not back to it; the imposing mountain scenery that
ennobles the landscape thereabouts; nor yet of ancient Padua or haughty
Verona; nor of their Montagues and Capulets, their famous balconies and
tombs of Juliet and Romeo et al., but hurry straight to the ancient city
of the sea, the widowed bride of the Adriatic. It was a long, long ride.
But toward evening, as we sat silent and hardly conscious of where we
were--subdued into that meditative calm that comes so surely after a
conversational storm--some one shouted--
"VENICE!"

And sure enough, afloat on the placid sea a league away, lay a great
city, with its towers and domes and steeples drowsing in a golden mist of
sunset.




CHAPTER XXII.

This Venice, which was a haughty, invincible, magnificent Republic for
nearly fourteen hundred years; whose armies compelled the world's
applause whenever and wherever they battled; whose navies well nigh held
dominion of the seas, and whose merchant fleets whitened the remotest
oceans with their sails and loaded these piers with the products of every
clime, is fallen a prey to poverty, neglect and melancholy decay. Six
hundred years ago, Venice was the Autocrat of Commerce; her mart was the
great commercial centre, the distributing-house from whence the enormous
trade of the Orient was spread abroad over the Western world. To-day her
piers are deserted, her warehouses are empty, her merchant fleets are
vanished, her armies and her navies are but memories. Her glory is
departed, and with her crumbling grandeur of wharves and palaces about
her she sits among her stagnant lagoons, forlorn and beggared, forgotten
of the world. She that in her palmy days commanded the commerce of a
hemisphere and made the weal or woe of nations with a beck of her
puissant finger, is become the humblest among the peoples of the earth,
--a peddler of glass beads for women, and trifling toys and trinkets for
school-girls and children.

The venerable Mother of the Republics is scarce a fit subject for
flippant speech or the idle gossipping of tourists. It seems a sort of
sacrilege to disturb the glamour of old romance that pictures her to us
softly from afar off as through a tinted mist, and curtains her ruin and
her desolation from our view. One ought, indeed, to turn away from her
rags, her poverty and her humiliation, and think of her only as she was
when she sunk the fleets of Charlemagne; when she humbled Frederick
Barbarossa or waved her victorious banners above the battlements of
Constantinople.

We reached Venice at eight in the evening, and entered a hearse belonging
to the Grand Hotel d'Europe. At any rate, it was more like a hearse than
any thing else, though to speak by the card, it was a gondola. And this
was the storied gondola of Venice!--the fairy boat in which the princely
cavaliers of the olden time were wont to cleave the waters of the moonlit
canals and look the eloquence of love into the soft eyes of patrician
beauties, while the gay gondolier in silken doublet touched his guitar
and sang as only gondoliers can sing! This the famed gondola and this
the gorgeous gondolier!--the one an inky, rusty old canoe with a sable
hearse-body clapped on to the middle of it, and the other a mangy,
barefooted guttersnipe with a portion of his raiment on exhibition which
should have been sacred from public scrutiny. Presently, as he turned a
corner and shot his hearse into a dismal ditch between two long rows of
towering, untenanted buildings, the gay gondolier began to sing, true to
the traditions of his race. I stood it a little while. Then I said:

"Now, here, Roderigo Gonzales Michael Angelo, I'm a pilgrim, and I'm a
stranger, but I am not going to have my feelings lacerated by any such
caterwauling as that. If that goes on, one of us has got to take water.
It is enough that my cherished dreams of Venice have been blighted
forever as to the romantic gondola and the gorgeous gondolier; this
system of destruction shall go no farther; I will accept the hearse,
under protest, and you may fly your flag of truce in peace, but here I
register a dark and bloody oath that you shan't sing. Another yelp, and
overboard you go."

I began to feel that the old Venice of song and story had departed
forever. But I was too hasty. In a few minutes we swept gracefully out
into the Grand Canal, and under the mellow moonlight the Venice of poetry
and romance stood revealed. Right from the water's edge rose long lines
of stately palaces of marble; gondolas were gliding swiftly hither and
thither and disappearing suddenly through unsuspected gates and alleys;
ponderous stone bridges threw their shadows athwart the glittering waves.
There was life and motion everywhere, and yet everywhere there was a
hush, a stealthy sort of stillness, that was suggestive of secret
enterprises of bravoes and of lovers; and clad half in moonbeams and half
in mysterious shadows, the grim old mansions of the Republic seemed to
have an expression about them of having an eye out for just such
enterprises as these at that same moment. Music came floating over the
waters--Venice was complete.

It was a beautiful picture--very soft and dreamy and beautiful. But what
was this Venice to compare with the Venice of midnight? Nothing. There
was a fete--a grand fete in honor of some saint who had been instrumental
in checking the cholera three hundred years ago, and all Venice was
abroad on the water. It was no common affair, for the Venetians did not
know how soon they might need the saint's services again, now that the
cholera was spreading every where. So in one vast space--say a third of
a mile wide and two miles long--were collected two thousand gondolas, and
every one of them had from two to ten, twenty and even thirty colored
lanterns suspended about it, and from four to a dozen occupants. Just as
far as the eye could reach, these painted lights were massed together
--like a vast garden of many-colored flowers, except that these blossoms
were never still; they were ceaselessly gliding in and out, and mingling
together, and seducing you into bewildering attempts to follow their mazy
evolutions. Here and there a strong red, green, or blue glare from a
rocket that was struggling to get away, splendidly illuminated all the
boats around it. Every gondola that swam by us, with its crescents and
pyramids and circles of colored lamps hung aloft, and lighting up the
faces of the young and the sweet-scented and lovely below, was a picture;
and the reflections of those lights, so long, so slender, so numberless,
so many-colored and so distorted and wrinkled by the waves, was a picture
likewise, and one that was enchantingly beautiful. Many and many a party
of young ladies and gentlemen had their state gondolas handsomely
decorated, and ate supper on board, bringing their swallow-tailed,
white-cravatted varlets to wait upon them, and having their tables
tricked out as if for a bridal supper. They had brought along the
costly globe lamps from their drawing-rooms, and the lace and silken
curtains from the same places, I suppose. And they had also brought
pianos and guitars, and they played and sang operas, while the plebeian
paper-lanterned gondolas from the suburbs and the back alleys crowded
around to stare and listen.