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millions of postcards.
    God be praised that this immortal spot exists!
    Immediately, I set to work, digging, burrowing, making my hole. I measured it with my Isfahan cane. I lay down in it, stretched out on my back. I made it wider and tamped down the bottom with my two hands to make it nice and comfortable. I made myself a pillow of pine-needles and loose soil, as I used to do when I played with Elena, the little girl, who could come and lie beside me, gently, oh, so gently, so as not to frighten away the small birds we had come to watch in the paddock, and we would not stir all afternoon.
    Today I needed a cure. My lassitude was too great. Like Kim, I could do no more. I was exhausted. But, before starting on Kim's cure, I went down to Posilippo to plunge into the sea and have a good swim, then I climbed up again with provisions for a week: bread, salami, mortadella, a cacio cavallo or horse's bottom, which is a cheese in the shape of a pilgrim's gourd or a double calabash, and a flask of wine as round and heavy as a church bell. My hollow cane was my bourdon. I climbed up to my hermitage full of joy and dying of impatience. I broke bread and gave thanks to God that nothing in the paddock had changed. I settled down to spend my first night in the garden of my childhood, this paradise lost and, tonight, regained.
    Like Kim I slept on my back. Like Kim I covered myself with earth up to my chin.
    With my head lolling back, my eye climbed the height of the centuries-old bole that sprang perpendicular from the ground at my head, and my memory leaped from branch to branch in its umbel, flitting, alighting, hovering, amusing itself like a goldfinch, a tit, a wagtail, as in Elena's time when we watched the little birds, so rare in the Neapolitan countryside that, when one of them has the misfortune to show himself on a Sunday afternoon, fifty rifle-shots are discharged simultaneously, fired by huntsmen in ambush, all equally savouring the idea of a little bird on a spit to augment their evening meal of polenta. Elena, the little girl, was killed by a rifle-shot one Sunday afternoon in this very paddock, at the foot of this same tree, where we had set a snare, she and I, and were lying in wait in our hole between the roots of the tree, our hearts racing, for the first bird who would fall into it. It was a rifle-shot fired by an invisible huntsman, a bungling fool. I dreamed. My childhood love. . . .
     
     
     
    And then it happened that my eye, distracted by melancholy and roving round the paddock as if to gather up all my scattered grief, came to rest on a small board nailed to the trunk of the world- famous umbrella pine. I had not noticed the board when I came in. I got up to see what it was. It bore this stencilled inscription :
    FOR SALE
     
    The name of the Agency had been obliterated. FOR SALE.
    11.0pt;line-height:normal;text-autospace:none'>   When I played there as a child, with little Elena, the darling, the enclosure belonged to her father, Andrea Ricordi, a Milanese with a great zest for living, who was court photographer by appointment. He had made a tremendous amount of money, not by taking portraits of the King and Queen, the Princesses and the Crown Prince (who was hoping for a son, though in fact this baby was not born until ten years later, at Raconnigi, and whose cradle, donated by the people of Naples, was on exhibition, giving rise to enthusiastic demonstrations of loyalty on the part of the Neapolitans and to festivities which were, for me, unforgettable) — Ricordi, then, had made a tremendous amount of money by photographing that celebrated view, reprinted millions and millions of times on postcards and slipped into pillar-boxes by foreign tourists, especially newly wedded couples, and distributed by the postal services of every country in the world, and it was precisely because of this, because he had made a fortune — and also to cut the ground from under the feet of any rival photographer who might