You remember that last of your many narrow escapes to-day as you trudge up the stony mule-track through the green valleys, and it strikes you that after all it is easier to walk from Diamante all the way to Verbicaro, than to face a March storm in the gulf of Salerno in an open boat on a dark night.  Up you go, past that strange ruin of the great Norman-Saracen castle standing alone on the steep little hill which rises out of the middle of the valley, commanding the roads on the right and the left.  You have heard of the Saracens but not of the Normans.  What kind of people lived there amongst those bristling ivy-grown towers?  Thieves of course.  Were they not Saracens and therefore Turks, according to your ethnology, and therefore brigands?  It is odd that the government should have allowed them to build a castle just there.  Perhaps they were stronger than the government.  You have never heard of Count Roger, either, though you know the story of Judas Iscariot by heart as you have heard it told many a time in Scalea.  Up you go, leaving the castle behind you, up to that square house they call the tower on the brow of the hill.  It is a lonely road, a mere sheep track over the heights.  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.  The new bridge which was standing in all its spick and span newness when you came last year, is a ruin now, washed away by the spring freshets.  A glance tells you that the massive-looking piers were hollow, built of one thickness of stone, shell-fashion, and filled with plain earth.  Somebody must have cheated.  Nothing new in that.  They are all thieves nowadays, seeking to eat, as you say in your dialect, with a strict simplicity which leaves nothing to the imagination.  At all events this bridge was a fraud, and the peasants clamber down a steep footpath they have made through its ruins, and up the other side.