Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 1).djvu/58

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46
IN MAREMMA.

mountains, which he frequented when it pleased him to descend upon the southward road nearer Rome, where more than once he had even stopped the mail train itself as it had rolled over the marshes and beneath the sombre gloom of the maritime pines, and had swerved off the line as it encountered the timber and stones that Saturnino's men had placed there in its path.

He had been always called Saturnino of the Santa Fiora, though his range had extended so much farther than these peaks, and towards Santa Fiora she made her way through the dense underwood and luxuriant vegetation that here cover the soil, where the roads are mere mule tracks, often effaced, and the amphitheatre of the mountains enclose a solitude and a silence scarcely ever broken save by sound of sheep-bell, or cry of bittern, or the browsing murmur of the teeth of wild cattle chewing the luscious grass.

Here on the wooded cliffs was once Saturnia, whose giant walls still remain, overgrown with laurestinus and mountain box and butcher's broom, and in the hovels that occupy its site, and take its name, where Saturnino forty-five years be-