Clouds do not seem to like
our landscape. But it has often struck me that Italian nights,
whenever clouds do congregate, are somehow as much darker than English
nights as Italian days are brighter than days in England. They have a
heavier and thicker nigritude. They shut things out from you more
impenetrably. They enclose you as in a small pavilion of black velvet.
This tenement is not very comfortable in a strong gale. It makes you
feel rather helpless. And gales can be strong enough, in the late
autumn, on the Riviera di Levante.
It is on nights when the wind blows its hardest, but makes no rift
anywhere for a star to peep through, that the Golden Drugget, as I
approach it, gladdens my heart the most. The distance between Rapallo
and my home up yonder is rather more than two miles. The road curves
and zigzags sharply, for the most part; but at the end of the first
mile it runs straight for three or four hundred yards; and, as the inn
stands at a point midway on this straight course, the Golden Drugget
is visible to me long before I come to it. Even by starlight, it is
good to see. How much better, if I happen to be out on a black rough
night when nothing is disclosed but this one calm bright thing.
Nothing? Well, there has been descriable, all the way, a certain grey
glimmer immediately in front of my feet.
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