Not a blade of grass, not a plant-nothing but granite.  As far as our eyes could reach, we saw in front of us a desert of glittering stone, heated like an oven by a burning sun, which seemed to hang for that very purpose right above the gorge.  When we raised our eyes towards the crests, we stood dazzled and stupefied by what we saw.  They looked like a festoon of coral; all the summits are of porphyry; and the sky overhead was violet, purple, tinged with the coloring of these strange mountains.  Lower down, the granite was of scintillating gray, and seemed ground to powder beneath our feet.  At our right, along a long and irregular course, roared a tumultuous torrent.  And we staggered along under this heat, in this light, in this burning, arid, desolate valley cut by this torrent of turbulent water which seemed to be ever hurrying onward, without fertilizing the rocks, lost in this furnace which greedily drank it up without being saturated or refreshed by it.

But, suddenly, there was visible at our right a little wooden cross sunk in a little heap of stones.  A man had been killed there; and I said to my companion.

“Tell me about your bandits.”

He replied: 

“I knew the most celebrated of them, the terrible St. Lucia.  I will tell you his history.

“His father was killed in a quarrel by a young man of the district, it is said; and St. Lucia was left alone with his sister.  He was a weak, timid youth, small, often ill, without any energy.  He did not proclaim vengeance against the assassin of his father.  All his relatives came to see him, and implored of him to avenge his death; he remained deaf to their menaces and their supplications.

“Then, following the old Corsican custom, his sister, in her indignation carried away his black clothes, in order that he might not wear mourning for a dead man who had not been avenged.  He was insensible to even this affront, and rather than take down from the rack his father’s gun, which was still loaded, he shut himself up, not daring to brave the looks of the young men of the district.

“He seemed to have even forgotten the crime, and lived with his sister in the seclusion of their dwelling.

“But, one day, the man who was suspected of having committed the murder, was about to get married.  St. Lucia did not appear to be moved by this news, but, out of sheer bravado, doubtless, the bridegroom, on his way to the church, passed before the house of the two orphans.

“The brother and the sister, at their window, were eating frijoles, when the young man saw the bridal procession going by.  Suddenly he began to tremble, rose to his feet without uttering a word, made the sign of the cross, took the gun which was hanging over the fireplace, and went out.

“When he spoke of this later on, he said:  ’I don’t know what was the matter with me; it was like fire in my blood; I felt that I must do it, that, in spite of everything, I could not resist, and I concealed the gun in a cave on the road to Corte.