You are over it at last, and that is Verbicaro, over there on the other side of the great valley, perched against the mountain side, a rough, grey mass of red-roofed houses cropping up like red-tipped rocks out of a vast, sloping vineyard.

And now there are people on the road, slender, barefooted, brown women in dark wine-coloured woollen skirts and scarlet cloth bodices much the worse for wear, treading lightly under half-a-quintal weight of grapes; well-to-do peasant men--galantuomini, they are all called in Calabria--driving laden mules before them, their dark blue jackets flung upon one shoulder, their white stockings remarkably white, their short home-spun breeches far from ragged, as a rule, but their queer little pointed hats mostly colourless and weather-beaten.

Boys and girls, too, meet you and stare at you, or overtake you at a great pace and almost run past you, with an enquiring backward glance, each carrying something--mostly grapes or figs.

Out at last, by the little chapel, upon what is the beginning of an inland carriage road--in a land where even the one-wheeled wheelbarrow has never been seen.

The grass grows thick among the broken stones, and men and beasts have made a narrow beaten track along the extreme outside edge of the precipice.