THE ENGADINE

There is an individual note, too, about the people, a suggestion of peculiar history that mocks us as we try to seize it. One of the earliest documents in a peoples archives is ordinarily their language, but that spoken by Engadiners, the interesting form of Romanic known as Ladin, one of the many tongues evolved from late Latin, only takes us back to the Roman {10}conquest of the Rhaetian upland that won the magniloquent admiration of Horace. In truth, the population is a human document, a palimpsest on which the Romans are but the latest and most masterful writers. Since, at the commencement of our era, the soldiers of Drusus and Tiberius wrote their enduring record, there have been only interlineations, mainly Teutonic, but many are the traces of antecedent scripts. Could we read below the prevailing Latin, we should probably find an elusive Keltic romance and enwoven with it perhaps a grave Etruscan legend, while scattered through all are undecipherable memorials of forgotten races and perished tongues. One ethnic wave after another has surged up that ancient highway from central Europe into Italy, and each as it passed or receded has contributed some component to the population...FROM THE BOOKS.