The Pillars of Hercules

It is not a popular train, though the Corsicans do everything they can to persuade people to use it. On an island of notoriously bad roads a trip on the Chemin de Fer de la Corse is one of the most restful ways to spend a day. The motto is: Prenez le Train, C’est plus Malin! (“Take the train, it’s smarter!”)

The mountains were still snowcapped, and I was told that there would be snow at their summits until July. I had seen them in Bastia, and even from the train I could see them: the men in clusters on street corners—talking, smoking, shaking hands, gesturing. There were few women on the streets, and those who were there walked briskly, not looking either left or right, giving an impression of great modesty and rectitude. This was the old world of the Mediterranean, the man’s world.

Winter had given the island a dramatic starkness that revealed the rugged landscape, the cliffs and peaks, the moorland that lay exposed through bare branches. This, and the behavior of Corsicans on the street, I was able to study at Biguglia, where the rail car stopped and the driver took out a newspaper and spread it on the console of his controls, and read it with close attention.

“I am going to look around,” I said.

“Don’t go far,” he said, without glancing up.

Twenty minutes passed. I smiled at a man on the platform, and we began talking harmlessly about the weather: how bright and cold it was, no rain, very nice, and then I said: “Have you ever been to Sardinia?”

He did not say no. He shook his head as though my question was insane, and he walked away. I wanted to tell him that I was going there. Sardinia is only four miles from Corsica’s south coast.

Another train pulled in, what in India would be called the Up Train, and because this was a single-line track we had to wait for it at this station in order to pass it. Then we were off again and deep in the low dense Corsican bush, universally known as the maquis.

• • •

Corsica is famous for having its own fragrant odor—the herbaceous whiff of the maquis—lavender, honeysuckle, cyclamen, myrtle, wild mint and rosemary. After he left Corsica as a young man, Napoleon never returned to the island, but exiled on Elba—which is just off the coast of Italy—he said he often savored the aroma of Corsica in the west wind. It smells like a barrel of potpourri, it is like holding a bar of expensive soap to your nose, it is Corsica’s own Vap-o-rub. The Corsican maquis is strong enough to clear your lungs and cure your cold.

This was not the Riviera, not France, it was definitely another country, and yet there were resemblances, Mediterranean similarities. The hint of herbs on a hot day in Provence was a fragrance in the breeze; here it was an aromatic feast, gusting through the window of the rail car. Here there were oleanders and palms and olive trees; and also dumps, and junkyards, and automobile graveyards. Yellow villages on the summits of high hills. There were miles of vineyards surrounding old venerable half-ruined villas. And there were fruit trees, some of the groves heavy with ripe lemons and pendulous bunches of clementines.

Two boys got off at Casamozza, one got on.

The villages were strange and lovely. They had the look of monasteries or fortresses, twenty stucco structures and a sentry-like church steeple, gathered at precipitous angles, and the deeper into the island we went, the higher up the villages were sited, until they almost crowned the summit. I could not imagine how the villagers lived their lives at such a steep angle, though it was obvious that these high and easily fortified villages were the reason the Corsicans had survived and had beaten off invaders. In these steep retreats Corsicans had kept their culture intact.

At the head of the valley looking west from the station of Ponte Nuovo I saw the snowcapped peak of Monte Asto, and there was nowhere else I wanted to be. Here, now, on this rail car rattling across Corsica under the massive benevolence of this godlike mountaintop—this for the moment was all that mattered to me, and I was reminded of the intense privacy, the intimate whispers, the random glimpses that grant us the epiphanies of travel.

We came to Ponte Leccia where the line branched to Ile-Rousse and Calvi, and moved along through the mountain passes and the maquis in sunshine, and it all seemed so lovely that I felt frivolous, almost embarrassed by my luck, at this thirteen-dollar train ride past the nameless villages plastered against the mountainsides, visited only by the soaring hawks.