World Literature Classics Library: The Count of Monte Cristo

Chapter 210 Pepino (2)
Last night Tang La was very happy and had another good night's sleep, so he is still happy until now.He was lazily lying on the seat of the carriage, which was a double-spring English carriage, and he could feel the two horses pulling the carriage forward at a fast speed.He knew that there was a post station every seven miles, and that was the only way to do it now. Who made him a banker, and he happened to be a bankrupt banker?Tangra thought for 10 minutes about his wife who stayed in Paris, about his daughter who was traveling around the world with Miss Amily for 10 minutes, and about his creditors and how to spend their money in the future for another 10 minutes, and then he There was nothing to think about, so I closed my eyes and fell asleep.But sometimes the car jolted violently. Tangra opened his eyes and felt that the carriage was still galloping in the outskirts of Rome. The remaining elevated aqueduct (a water diversion facility in the ancient Roman era.) was intermittently seen beside the road, as if suddenly in the wild running. Stop the frozen granite giant.The night was vast, the sky was cold and gloomy, and it was raining.At this time, it is better for a person who is almost drowsy to lie down on the car seat with his eyes closed, and he does not need to ask the driver where he is, and even if he asks, he will only answer "I don't understand", so Tang La Then I fell asleep again, thinking that I would always wake up at the station in front of me.

The carriage stopped, Tangra thought, the destination he was eagerly looking forward to finally arrived.He opened his eyes and looked out through the car window.He thought he was in some town, or at least a village, but all he could see was a single, run-down house, and three or four ghostly people walking up and down.Tang La waited for a while, he thought that the coachman had finished his journey and would come to ask for the fare, and he also wanted to take this opportunity to ask the new coachman about the situation.However, the original shaft horse had already been harnessed, and the new horse had been harnessed to the cart, but no one came to ask for money for the cart.Feeling strange, Tangra opened the door, but a strong hand pushed the door shut, and the carriage moved again.The baron was stunned, and all of a sudden he woke up. "Hi!" he said to the coachman, "hello! my dear, the original is Italian.!" This Italian phrase is often used in the Romance, and the baron heard it when his daughter sang a duet with Prince Cavalleconti, But the mic caro didn't pay any attention, so Tang La had no choice but to open the car window.

"Hello, friend! Where are we going?" he said, poking his head out of the window.

"Hold your head in. The original text is Italian.!" a bass voice said arrogantly, and the man waved his hand viciously.

Tangra understood it. From this point of view, his Italian has improved rapidly.So he shrank his head back, feeling uneasy.Moreover, he was getting more and more restless.When he first started on the road, we have already said that his head was empty and he just felt sleepy, but now it has only been a few minutes, and his head, let's put it this way, is already full of all kinds of things. thoughts, and each of these thoughts can arouse the rusher more than the other, especially those who are in a situation like Tang Gela's.It was pitch black all around, but his eyes could see clearly.When people are particularly nervous, this is always the case at the beginning, but after a long time, the eyes get tired and blurred.When people are not afraid, they see things clearly. When they are about to be afraid, they see things with double shadows. When they are really afraid, they see things blurry.Tangra saw a man wrapped in a cloak running close to the door on the right side on a horse. "Like a gendarme," he said, "has the French notified the papal authorities of my situation?"

"Where are you taking me?" he asked.

"Hold your head in!" The voice was still the same, speaking in a fierce tone.

Tang La turned around towards the left car door, and another man on horseback ran beside the left car door. "Really," Tangra said, cold sweat broke out on his forehead, "Really, I was arrested." He leaned back on the car seat, but this time he didn't want to sleep, but wanted to think about it .After a while, the moon rose.He looked out into the wilderness from the carriage, and he saw these giant aqueducts like stone monsters again. He had seen them earlier on the road, but just now he saw them from the right side of the carriage, but now he is on the left See these big boulders.He understood that the carriage had come full circle and was now pulling him back to Rome. "Oh! bad luck," he said softly, "they must have obtained the right of extradition." The carriage continued to gallop forward at an astonishing speed, and passed an hour of suspense in this way, and every time it saw a marker on the road, the wagon The people on board clearly recognized that the carriage was pulling him back to Rome by the same road.At last he saw a large black mass in front of him, and felt that the carriage was about to crash into it.But as soon as the carriage turned a corner, it walked close to the black thing. Looking carefully, it turned out to be the city wall surrounding Rome. "Oh! Oh!" Tangla murmured, "The car didn't enter the city, so it wasn't the bailiff who arrested me. Good God! What else is it? Could it be..." His hair They all stood upside down.He recalled the amusing tales of the Roman robbers, of which he was dubious in Paris, but Albert Mocerf, when he was the future son-in-law of Madame Donglas and the future husband of Eugenie, the young Viscount He told them both personally. "Possibly robbers!" he said softly.

Suddenly, the carriage stepped onto a carriage road that was harder than the sandy road. Tangra bravely looked at the roads on both sides of the carriage, and found that there were some strangely shaped stone monuments beside the road. Every detail rose before his eyes, and he realized that the road he was taking was the Via Appienne.The left side of the carriage looks like a valley, and there is a big round pit in a trance. This is the Caracalla Arena.The man who was riding behind the door on the right said something, and the carriage stopped immediately, and at the same time, the door on the left opened. "Come down, the original text is Italian.!" a voice ordered.

Tangra got out of the car immediately. He couldn't speak Italian yet, but he could already understand it.The baron, half dead with fright, glanced around.Not counting the coachman, there were four other people surrounding him. "Follow the original in Italian," said one of the four, as he walked down a small road that joined Via Appiena at the other end, surrounded by the rolling Roman countryside.Tang Gela didn't make any argument, but obediently followed the person in front, and he didn't need to look back to know that there were three other people behind him.However, he also felt that every time they walked a section of almost the same length, one of them was left standing on the road, as if watching sentry.After walking like this for about 10 minutes, Tangla didn't say a word to the person leading the way, and found himself in the middle of a small hill and a clump of tall weeds.I saw three people standing in a triangle without making a sound, and Tang La was just at the center of the triangle.He tried to speak, but his tongue wouldn't work. "Go forward (Original in Italian.)," said the same short and commanding voice.This time Tangra understood [-]%, he not only understood the words, but also felt it from the action, because the person behind him pushed him hard, and he slammed into the ground On the person leading the way ahead.

The man leading the way is our friend Pepino.He crept into the grass by a path known only to stone martens and lizards, and Peppino stopped in front of a rock densely covered with thorns.There was a crack in the rock like a squinting eye, through which the young man Pepino had slipped, and he had slipped through a trap door like a ghost in a fantasy play, and disappeared after slipping in.The man behind Tangla yelled and waved his hand again, telling the banker to follow suit.Now there was no doubt that the French bankrupt had really met robbers.Tang Gela was like a person who was under attack from both sides, but he mustered up his courage in the panic, and squeezed into the crack bravely.Although his fat belly was not suitable for the Diamond Head Slit in the countryside of Rome, he still squeezed in behind Pepino.He closed his eyes, allowed himself to slide down, straightened his legs and slid down.He stepped on the ground again, and opened his eyes.

The road inside is very wide, but it is still dark and I can't see anything clearly.Pepino was no longer hiding, for he had come to his place, so he struck the scythe and lighted the torch.The other two people also got down from the crevice of the rocks after Tangla, and then held up behind. Tangla occasionally stopped and they pushed him forward. In this way, they drove Tangla down a steep slope to a gloomy place. crossroads.This place is indeed creepy, with rows of coffin holes dug out layer upon layer on the stone wall. The white walls and black holes are really like the deep and black eye sockets on a dead man's skeleton.A sentry robber clasped the breech of his carbine with his left hand.

"Which one?" asked the robber on guard.

"Our own, our own," said Pepino, "where is the chief?"

"There," replied the sentinel, pointing to the hall-like stone cave behind his shoulder, the light in the cave shone through the arched doorway onto the corridor.

"A big piece of meat, sir, a big piece of meat," said Pepino in Italian.After finishing speaking, he grabbed the collar of Tangla's dress and pulled him to a hole like a door, and then walked through the hole into the hall, which seemed to be the place where the leader lived.

"Is that the person?" The leader put down the ancient Greek writer Protarch (50-125) he was reading seriously.Wrote the "Biography of Alexander the Great" King of Macedon (356 BC - 323 BC).asked:
"It's him, the leader, it's him."

"Great, show me what it looks like."

Such an order was absurd enough, but when Pepino heard the order, he suddenly took a torch and shone it on Tangra's face. Tangra stepped back quickly, for fear of burning his own eyebrows.This face is already crooked, white and bared, it has already been frightened and ugly.

"The man is tired," said the chief, "take him to bed."

"Oh!" Tangla said to himself, "This bed is most likely the coffin in the cave in the stone wall. They told me to sleep, but in fact they wanted me to die. Just now I saw several short knives shining in the dark. One is enough to finish me off."

At the back of the spacious hall, lying in the dark, a number of people rose from mattresses of hay or wolfskins, and they belonged to the chief, and the chief was Albert Mocerf. The one I met before was reading "Memoirs of Caesar" at that time, but now Tangra saw him, but he was reading "Biography of Alexander the Great".The banker uttered a dull groan and followed Pepino.He didn't want to pray or shout.He has no energy, no will, no strength, and no thoughts. He is walking forward only because he is being dragged along.He stepped on a step, and only then did he realize that there was a step ahead, so he bent down instinctively, for fear that he would hit something and break his head, and when he went down the step, he would find a dungeon hewn out of the rock.

Although the dungeon is just a few bare stone walls, the inside is clean. Although it is buried in an unfathomable place underground, it is not damp at all.A hay bed covered with goatskin, although it was not a real bed, but just a floor in the corner of the dungeon, but as soon as Tangla saw it, he felt that he was lucky and hopeful. "Oh, praise God!" he murmured, "it's true, it's a bed!" He had mentioned God for the second time in an hour, and for the first time in ten years. "The original language is Italian.!" said the robber who led the way, then pushed Tangra inside and closed the cell door.With a creak, the door latch was locked, and Tangra became a prisoner.And, without the bar, no one could escape from this den of robbers in the tomb of St. Sebastian unless it was St. Pierre, unless an angel led the way.The leader of this gang of trail cutters, the reader must have recognized, is the famous Lüri Wampa.

Tang La also recognized the robber.Back then when Moserf was talking about the robber in France, Tangra didn't believe it was real, but now he not only recognized the bandit, but also recognized that this dungeon was the one where Moserf was imprisoned. Probably this is a room specially reserved for foreigners.Thinking of these things, Tang Gela felt a little happy in his heart, and he became calmer.Since the robbers didn't want him dead right away, they didn't mean to kill him.They had arrested him for money, but he had only a few louis d'or, and now he was kidnapped for ransom.He remembered that Mosef's ransom seemed to be 4000 ecu at the beginning. He felt that he was worth more than Mosef, so he made up his mind and set his ransom at 8000 ecu. 8000 crowns are 4.8 livres, and he actually has 505 francs.With this amount of money, you can travel anywhere in the world.Thinking about it this way, he felt more at ease, and felt that he could handle it, because no one had ever paid 505 million francs for the ransom.Tang Gela lay down on his bed, turned over two or three times, and fell asleep peacefully just like the great emperor in the biography that Luri Wangpa was reading.

(End of this chapter)