The result was that he had been forced to spend thirty-six hours cooped up in a scorching hot box, suffocated by the smoke of tunnels repetitive as feverish dreams, blinded by the sun in open patches stark as sad realities, humiliated by the innumerable squalid services he had to ask of his alarmed grandson. They crossed evil-looking landscapes, accursed mountain ranges, torpid malarial plains, those landscapes of Calabria and Basilicata which seemed barbarous to him while they were actually just like those of Sicily.
