But I proposed no long stay at Cosenza, where malarial fever is endemic, and it did not seem worth while to change my quarters.

I slept very well.
I had come here to think about Alaric, and with my own eyes to behold the place of his burial.

Ever since the first boyish reading of Gibbon, my imagination has loved to play upon that scene of Alaric's death.
Thinking to conquer Sicily, the Visigoth marched as far as to the capital of the Bruttii, those mountain tribes which Rome herself never really subdued; at Consentia he fell sick and died.

How often had I longed to see this river Busento, which the "labour of a captive multitude" turned aside, that its flood might cover and conceal for all time the tomb of the Conqueror! I saw it in the light of sunrise, flowing amid low, brown, olive-planted hills; at this time of the year it is a narrow, but rapid stream, running through a wide, waste bed of yellow sand and stones.

The Crati, which here has only just started upon its long seaward way from some glen of Sila, presents much the same appearance, the track which it has worn in flood being many times as broad as the actual current.