directly, lest you should come within the range of the new
explosion.
There were numbers of men, working high up in these hills – on the
sides – clearing away, and sending down the broken masses of stone
and earth, to make way for the blocks of marble that had been
discovered. As these came rolling down from unseen hands into the
narrow valley, I could not help thinking of the deep glen (just the
same sort of glen) where the Roc left Sindbad the Sailor; and where
the merchants from the heights above, flung down great pieces of
meat for the diamonds to stick to. There were no eagles here, to
darken the sun in their swoop, and pounce upon them; but it was as
wild and fierce as if there had been hundreds.
But the road, the road down which the marble comes, however immense
the blocks! The genius of the country, and the spirit of its
institutions, pave that road: repair it, watch it, keep it going!
Conceive a channel of water running over a rocky bed, beset with
great heaps of stone of all shapes and sizes, winding down the
middle of this valley; and THAT being the road – because it was the
road five hundred years ago! Imagine the clumsy carts of five
hundred years ago, being used to this hour, and drawn, as they used
to be, five hundred years ago, by oxen, whose ancestors were worn
to death five hundred years ago, as their unhappy descendants are
now, in twelve months, by the suffering and agony of this cruel
work! Two pair, four pair, ten pair, twenty pair, to one block,
according to its size; down it must come, this way. In their
struggling from stone to stone, with their enormous loads behind
them, they die frequently upon the spot; and not they alone; for
their passionate drivers, sometimes tumbling down in their energy,
are crushed to death beneath the wheels. But it was good five
hundred years ago, and it must be good now: and a railroad down
one of these steeps (the easiest thing in the world) would be flat
blasphemy.
When we stood aside, to see one of these cars drawn by only a pair
of oxen (for it had but one small block of marble on it), coming
down, I hailed, in my heart, the man who sat upon the heavy yoke,
to keep it on the neck of the poor beasts – and who faced
backwards: not before him – as the very Devil of true despotism.
He had a great rod in his hand, with an iron point; and when they
could plough and force their way through the loose bed of the
torrent no longer, and came to a stop, he poked it into their
bodies, beat it on their heads, screwed it round and round in their
nostrils, got them on a yard or two, in the madness of intense
pain; repeated all these persuasions, with increased intensity of
purpose, when they stopped again; got them on, once more; forced
and goaded them to an abrupter point of the descent; and when their
writhing and smarting, and the weight behind them, bore them
plunging down the precipice in a cloud of scattered water, whirled
his rod above his head, and gave a great whoop and hallo, as if he
had achieved something, and had no idea that they might shake him
off, and blindly mash his brains upon the road, in the noon-tide of
his triumph.
Page 66
Dickens, Charles – Pictures From Italy
Standing in one of the many studii of Carrara, that afternoon – for
it is a great workshop, full of beautifully-finished copies in
marble, of almost every figure, group, and bust, we know – it
seemed, at first, so strange to me that those exquisite shapes,
replete with grace, and thought, and delicate repose, should grow
out of all this toil, and sweat, and torture! But I soon found a
parallel to it, and an explanation of it, in every virtue that
springs up in miserable ground, and every good thing that has its
birth in sorrow and distress. And, looking out of the sculptor’s