Campo Santo Page 3

  * Feuding Conflict and Banditry in Nineteenth-Century Corsica (Cambridge University, 1988).

  The Alps in the Sea

  Once upon a time Corsica was entirely covered by forest. Story by story it grew for thousands of years in rivalry with itself, up to heights of fifty meters and more, and who knows, perhaps larger and larger species would have evolved, trees reaching to the sky, if the first settlers had not appeared and if, with the typical fear felt by their own kind for its place of origin, they had not steadily forced the forest back again.

  The degradation of the most highly developed plant species is a process known to have begun near what we call the cradle of civilization. Most of the high forests that once grew all the way to the Dalmatian, Iberian, and North African coasts had already been cut down by the beginning of the present era. Only in the interior of Corsica did a few forests of trees towering far taller than those of today remain, and they were still being described with awe by nineteenth-century travelers, although now they have almost entirely disappeared. Of the silver firs that were among the dominant tree species of Corsica in the Middle Ages, standing everywhere in the mists clinging to the mountains, on overshadowed slopes and in ravines, only a few relics are now left in the Marmano valley and the Forêt de Puntiello; and on a walk there, a remembered image came into my mind of a forest in the Innerfern through which I had once gone as a child with my grandfather.