Fantastic Tales by Iginio Ugo Tarchetti

Author:Iginio Ugo Tarchetti [Tarchetti, Iginio Ugo]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2020-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

The Lake of the Three Lampreys

(A Popular Tradition)

LA SILA is a colossal forest in Southern Italy. Its holm oaks, ancient as the world, its swarthy, centuries-old larches, its common oaks, venerable with majesty, invest it with a frightening, savage appearance. These trees grow alone here, uncultivated, untouched by human hand. Here nature is sad and solitary, and a dreadful silence prevails. Only in the final hours of the day, near sunset, does the eagle sometimes rise amidst the trees and clouds to turn his solemn, measured circles and emit his melancholy shriek from on high, while packs of youthful wild boar crash through the thickets, splitting the saplings and rousing all the echoes of the forest. Here is no bird’s flight, no woodsman’s song. If you sound your voice, a long, sustained echo repeats your words. It seems as if this sound reverberating in the vault of the towering oaks will never fade, evoking an emotion akin to fear in any person who occasions it. These places are memorable for their antiquity and their popular traditions. Here flows the old Busento, whose waters bathe Cosenza and have roared over Alaric’s grave in the nearby Crati Valley for fourteen hundred years. (He had such a magnificent tomb in this riverbed: they diverted the current and excavated an elegant sitting room, closer to a bridal suite than a grave, and after lowering the king into it, they brought back the waters.) From there extends the forest with its huge linden and white plane trees. At first, the trees grow sparsely and without underbrush like garden trees, and the surrounding area is inhabited by small birds, charming robins with their mobile tails, hopping yellow wagtails, and wrens the size of butterflies. Near these trees, several streams, with sources that lie somewhere in La Sila’s still unexplored cliffs, create foaming waterfalls and small pools, whose banks are populated by frogs, thin green snakes, large speckled lizards, and little ribbon-shaped tarantulas, all content to dwell in those delicious, solitary margins. Within the wood, however, the spectacle is different, harsher, and more imposing. A light rustling of leaves now and then is the sign of a wild goat passing by, unobserved; an indistinct sound of voices is the confident, malicious yelping of wolves, and a harmony suffused with harplike melancholy is the buzzing of a bee or a dancing dragonfly. Here nature seems to have gathered what is most charming and most terrifying.

On one occasion, I entered this forest, and without realizing that I was traveling a very long distance, I found that I had penetrated deeply among the trees, and the sun was about to set. I became aware of the time from the last rays of sunlight, which obliquely colored the broad leaves of the alder and oak trees. Reluctantly, I prepared to return, anxious about the night and my unfamiliarity with the place. I had, moreover, already taken many steps toward the clearing. The path appeared to me and certainly was the same.

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