“Is this going to last?” I shouted to him.

“No, no, signore” he answered gaily.  “It will be over in a minute or two. Ecco il sole!”

I beheld no sun, either then or at any moment during the rest of the day, but the voice was so reassuring that I gladly gave ear to it.  On we drove, down the lovely vale of the Corace, through orange-groves and pine-woods, laurels and myrtles, carobs and olive trees, with the rain beating fiercely upon us, the wind swaying all the leafage like billows on a stormy sea.  At the Marina of Catanzaro we turned southward on the coast road, pursued it for two or three miles, then branched upon our inland way.  The storm showed no sign of coming to an end.  Several times the carriage stopped, and the lad got down to examine his horses—­perhaps to sympathize with them; he was such a drenched, battered, pitiable object that I reproached myself for allowing him to pursue the journey.

“Brutto tempo!” he screamed above the uproar, when I again spoke to him; but in such a cheery tone that I did not think it worth while to make any further remark.

Through the driving rain, I studied as well as I could the features of the country.  On my left hand stretched a long fiat-topped mountain, forming the southern slope of the valley we ascended; steep, dark, and furrowed with innumerable torrent-beds, it frowned upon a river that rushed along the ravine at its foot to pour into the sea where the mountain broke as a rugged cliff.  This was the Mons Moscius of old time, which sheltered the monastery built by Cassiodorus.  The headlong, swollen flood, coloured like yellow clay, held little resemblance to the picture I had made of that river Pellena which murmurs so musically in the old writer’s pages.  Its valley was heaped with great blocks of granite—­a feature which has interest for the geologist; it marks an abrupt change of system, from the soft stone of Catanzaro (which ends the Apennine) to the granitic mass of Aspromonte (the toe of Italy) which must have risen above the waters long before the Apennines came into existence.  The wild weather emphasized a natural difference between this valley of Squillace and that which rises towards Catanzaro; here is but scanty vegetation, little more than thin orchards of olive, and the landscape has a bare, harsh character.  Is it changed so greatly since the sixth century of our era?  Or did its beauty lie in the eyes of Cassiodorus, who throughout his long life of statesmanship in the north never forgot this Bruttian home, and who sought peace at last amid the scenes of his childhood?