Fifty
paces away, again, is a wide thoroughfare, perhaps, raging and roaring
with traffic from the port. A hundred yards in another direction, and
there is a clean, deserted court, into which the midday sun pours itself
as into a reservoir of light,--a court with a quiet church and simple
old houses, through the doors of which pale-faced ecclesiastics silently
come and go.
Round the next corner leads a dark lane, between hugely high buildings
that press the air and keep out the sun and all sky but a thin ribband
of blue. And the air is heavy with all vile things, from the ill-washed
linen that hangs, slowly drying, from the upper windows, thrust out into
the draught with sticks, to the rotting garbage in the gutters below.
The low-arched doors open directly upon the slimy, black pavement; and
in the deep shadows within sit strange figures with doughy faces and
glassy eyes, breathing in the stench of the nauseous, steamy
air,--working a little, perhaps, at some one of the shadowy, back-street
trades of a great city, but poisoned to death from birth by the air they
live in, diseased of the diseased, from very childhood, and prolific as
disease itself, multiplying to fatten death at the next pestilence.
And then, again, a vast square, gaudy with coloured handbills, noisy
with wheels and the everlasting Neapolitan chattering of a thick-lipped,
loud, degenerate dialect. There the little one-horse cabs tear hither
and thither, drivers lashing their wretched beasts, wheels whirling,
arms gesticulating, bad eyes flashing and leering, thick lips chattering
everlastingly: and the tram-cars roll along, crowded till the people
cling to one another on the steps; and the small boys dodge in and out
between the cars and the carriages and the horses and the
foot-passengers, some screaming out papers for sale, some looking for
pockets to pick, some hunting for stumps of cigars in the dust,--dirty,
ragged, joyous, foul-mouthed, God-forsaken little boys; and then through
the midst of all, as a black swan swimming stately through muddy waters,
comes a splendid, princely equipage, all in mourning, from the black
horses to the heavy veil just raised across a young widow's white
face--and so, from contrast to contrast, through the dense city, and
down to the teeming port, and out at last to the magic southern sea,
where the clean life of the white-sailed ships passes silently, and
scarce leaves a momentary wake to mar the pure waters of the tideless
bay.
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