He had made a plan for the next
hours, which gave him hope for the future.
After breakfast, he walked into the gray and ancient mountain-village of
La Turbie, whose old houses and walls of tunnelled streets were built
from the wreckage of Caesar's Trophy. Jewish faces peered at him from
high, dark windows, for here it was that, in the Middle Ages, Jews fled
from persecution, and made La Turbie a Jewish settlement. Even in the
newer town of pink and blue and yellow houses there were Jewish faces to
be seen in dusky shops where fruit was displayed for sale, in heaps like
many-coloured jewels.
Just beyond the oldest outskirts Vanno came to the foot of the monument,
unspeakably majestic still, though long ago stripped of its splendid
marbles, and its statues that commemorated Caesar's triumph. Men were
working in the shadow of the vast column of stone and crumbling Roman
brick, digging for lost knowledge in the form of broken inscriptions,
hands and heads of statues, bits of carved cornice, and a hundred buried
treasures by means of which the historical puzzle-picture might
gradually be matched together. Vanno became interested, and spent an
hour watching and talking to the superintendent of the work, a cultured
archaeologist. When he began his descent of the mountain, a train on the
funicular railroad was feeling its way cautiously down the steep
mountainside, like a child on tiptoe. A little weak, irritable sniff
came up from its engine as the toy train paused at one of the three
stopping places below La Turbie.
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