To the right and left the barren mountains reared their enormous baldness to the sun, deserts raised up broadside, as it were, and set on end, that their bareness might be the better seen and known to the world around.  Here and there, from their bases, dark wooded spurs ran out across the rising valley, and the road wound round them, in and out, and up and down, and over stone bridges big and little, and then up in terribly steep ascent, southeastwards to high Laviano, looking towards the pass by which the highway leads from Ciliento to Basilicata.

In Laviano, facing the wretched houses, stood the grand beginning of a wretchedly unfinished building, one of those utter failures of great hopes, which trace the track of invading liberty through the south.  It came, it saw, and it began many things—­but it did not conquer and it completed very little.  In the first wild enthusiasm of the Garibaldian revolution, even poor, hill-perched, filth-stricken, pig-breeding Laviano was to be a city, and forthwith, in the general stye, the walls of a great municipal building, from which lofty destinies were to be guided and controlled in the path to greatness, began to rise, with strength of stone masonry, and arches of well-hewn basalt, and divisions within for halls and stairways, and many offices.  But the beams of the first story were never laid across the lower walls.  There was no more money, and what had been built was a palace for the pigs.  Laviano had spent its little all, and gone into debt, to be great, and had failed; and though the people had earned some of their own money back as wages in the building, more than half of it slipped into the pockets of architects, who went away smiling, jeering, and happy, to prey upon the next foolish village that would be great and could not.  And above, from a hill on the mountain’s spur outside the village, still frowned intact the heavy four-towered castle, complete and sound as when it had been built, the lasting monument of those hard warriors of a sterner time, who could not only take, but hold—­and they held long and cruelly.

Veronica looked up backwards at the towers, as the horses stood a while to breathe after the steep ascent, and she asked Don Teodoro to whom the castle belonged.

“It is yours,” he answered.  “The castle is yours, the village is yours, the hills are yours.  Your steward lives in the castle.  You have much property here, more miles of good and bad land than I can tell.”

“And is it all like this?  Are the people all like these?”

“No.  There are poorer people in the hills.”

The happy laugh that had come when the wind had blown the olive blossoms of Eboli upon her lap had long been silent now.  Her face was grave and sorrowful, and she drew in her lips as though something hurt her.  Some half-naked children stood shyly watching her from a little distance.  Pigs grunted and rubbed themselves against the wheels of the carriage, and the coachman lashed backwards at them with his whip.  But the cruel day was not yet over, and the people had not come back from their toil, so that the place was almost deserted still.  There was an evil smell in the air, and the children’s faces were pale and swollen and dirty.