Page 43 - WTP Vol. XI #6

In the ensuing socializing, several things occurred. Among the throng, Parsons encountered a young man from Florence whose friends in the region had brought him to the party as Corrado had brought him. Cold bottle in hand, the young man, grinning, professed his relief at having found someone else whose speech he could follow. “It’s terrible” he exclaimed. “From one small town to the next any more, no one can understand anybody else! Tanti dialetti! And here! My word...”
The more notable things, however, that had capped off the evening—beyond, of course, the lamb, served on heaping platters with large chunks of bread (Parsons
ate several helpings)—pertained to the cliff face. While they were still awaiting dinner, one of the men who was helping out came up to Parsons where he sat on a stone seat, hard by the cliff face. Smiling, the man said, “Put your hand in that hole.”
Parsons turned to look. The hole was one of several right there on the cliff face adjacent to where he sat. Slightly larger than a fist, these “sockets,” as it were, were pitch-dark openings running straight into the rock.
Parsons didn’t relish the man’s invitation, averse, since early childhood, to multi-legged types, spiders especially.
The man smiled. “Go on!” he urged. “Put your hand in one. Nothing will hurt you!”
By this point, of course, an audience had gathered, attentive and waiting. Parsons understood that, as the new kid in town, he had an obligation to endure and pass this test. Seeking not to flinch, he thrust his hand in.
What his hand encountered was, it seemed, solid ice. Instantly he found his fist wreathed in frigid rock. “My word!” he exclaimed, withdrawing his hand in wonder. “What—?”
The man beamed, explaining. A thousand feet below them rushed an underground river, violent in its current. This subterranean torrent, flowing far, far beneath them, refrigerated the entire mountain rising about it.
“Come with me!” the man urged, again smiling broadly. “There’s even better yet!”
Parsons rose and followed him some yards down the cliff face, where they came upon a door—a double door of weathered wood, flush up against the rock. The man flung open the left half of this door and invited Parsons in. The interior was a cave, an ice-cold space, his breath turned instantly to wide cones of vapor. A single gray bulb leaked light overhead. Parsons felt a shiver, not just from the cold.
The cave was a shallow one, no more, he calculated, than some fifteen feet in depth, and about the same in breadth. And filled, crammed full, in rough stacks rising high off the bare stone floor, with... cases of beer!
The underground river, flowing a thousand feet below them, a subterranean torrent . . . it had seemed to Parsons, then, a metaphor of a sort.
~
“Bravo!” exclaimed the professor, the story evidently finished.
He half-lifted himself from his chair once again, not to protest, but to toast Parsons’ story. The younger wives smiled shyly, clapping their hands lightly.
Roberto fairly beamed. His wife Liliana and the Contessa both smiled. “A remarkable story! And very well told!”
Parsons bowed slightly, accepting the praise. Then, straightening, he said, “You’ve been very patient with me, very indulgent, all of you. But, alas, it’s not quite finished. No, not quite! Yes, my story! A curious coda concludes it. Which I’ll keep very brief.”
It happened, he continued, that his visit to the Abruzzi had culminated his adventures and his research for that summer. With the exception of one: a short stay in Cerveteri before his flight home, and a final piece of Etruscan business.
The director of the new excavations in Cerveteri
had invited him to come by to observe the work in progress. After decades of searching—after centuries of confounding everyone who had sought it—the ancient city of Cerveteri had at last been located, some kilometers away, to everybody’s surprise, from the famed necropoli known for so long.
“It was marvelous to have a first look at those ruins!
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