LE OPERE: The Blind Kittens

"The plan of the Ibba property, on a scale of I to 5,000, covered a strip of oiled paper six foot long and two and a half feet wide. Not that everything shown on the map belonged to the family: there was, first of all, to the south a narrow strip of sea belonging to no one on a coast line fringed with tunny fisheries; to the north were inhospitable mountains on which the Ibbas had never wanted to lay their hands; and, amid the mass of lemon-yellow indicating various family propertes, were a number of fair-sized white blobs: lands that never came on the market because the owners were rich: lands that had been offered but in the hands of people who were still, at it were, undercooked, not yet fit for mastication."