The journey east was the eeriest trip I’ve ever made. There was no light in the small towns and villages we passed. (I do not remember seeing a single light.) The light from the train cast the oddest shadows on the unfamiliar and strange scenes. It was like going back three hundred years to see old buildings, nocturnal pastoral scenes, and dim freezes from a passing time machine. I could just see the coach of Louis XVI clambering by on this the Night of Spurs when he was fleeing for his life to Metz not far from Germany. I was also fleeing France. I remember passing the pleasant French countryside which finally yielded to mountains which I did not know were the Alps. My first impression seeing them in the wee hours of the morning was that they were the most beautiful sight I'd ever seen. The smaller mountains were pink and you looked up to white capped ones against the most beautiful sky. I can still see them perfectly in my mind. They looked like a giant layer cake. Hannibal probably thought the same only with Rome’s plunder on his mind.
Excerpt from Journal of the Silent Majority:
“The Alps were always a silent magnificent wonder to the barbarian tribes. As you go towards them, past the gently rolling hills of southern France, once the Hercynian Forest full of bears and wolves, towards the shrouded purple mists of the uplands to the pink of the mountain bases and finally to the lofty white peaks themselves and beyond to the world of ancient history, you will encounter a great reservoir of culture – Rome.
There were stories and fables that were told by Edward Gibbon that are today totally forgotten like the fable of the Seven Sleepers, the story of the Vestal Virgins, how there was a pale around the sun lasting for a year after the assassination of Caesar, how Constantine fought under the apparition of “By this Sign, Conquer,” and how Rome became the wonder of the world with theatres hosting over 3,000 dancers and 3,000 singers, 14 aqueducts, modern sewers, temples, marbled baths with running hot water, markets selling spices and pepper of India and the goods of Egypt, and the palaces of Rome each equal to a city. There was the story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by the she-wolf. Our history books delete the stories of how our European ancestors overcame the Carthaginian threat to destroy Rome. American children no longer know about Julius Caesar, Pompey, Julian, Augustus, the frail and crippled Emperor Claudius, or the killers Caligula, Diocletian, or Nero who even killed his mother. American children aren’t inoculated against the ultimate abuses of authority by the knowledge of cruelties and exterminations beyond imagination. They don’t know about how government under despots and tyrants routinely boiled, drowned, flayed alive, sewed up in animal skins, tore limbs asunder with horses, fried, mutilated, fed to lions and beasts like the bears Mica Aurea and Innocence, stabbed, beat with clubs, or blinded their enemies. They will never have an appreciation or understanding of the dark side of human nature that tells us about the intrigues and conspiracies that routinely stain the annals of our majority history. Genghis Khan and the Mongols in three capitals murdered 4,347,000 people. Battles consumed generations and left the countryside void of people for hundreds of years.”
Lyon on the Rhone River held an interesting past. It was a royalist city at the time of the French Revolution, in fact so royal that revolutionaries tried to raze it to the ground. As a scene of massacres, the Rhone was cluttered with mutilated floaters. In our time the Rhone is where the Soviets tested their new Mig 25 Foxbat by flying it down the Rhone Valley to see if the French Mirage jets could catch it. I arrived in Lyons later on in the morning to industrial smog blanketing the city. I could barely breathe. All the romanticism of ancient culture quickly disappeared.
