There Is A Note Of Joyous Vigour In This Landscape.
The mule-track winds
in and out among the heights, through flowery meadows grazed by cattle
and full of
Buzzing insects and butterflies, and along hill-sides
cunningly irrigated; it climbs up to heathery summits and down again
through glades of chestnut and ilex with mossy trunks, whose shadow
fosters strange sensations of chill and gloom. Then out again, into the
sunshine of waving corn and poppies.
For a short while we stumbled along a torrent-bed, and I grew rather sad
to think that it might be the last I should see for some time to come,
my days in this country being now numbered. This one was narrow. But
there are others, interminable in length and breadth. Interminable! No
breeze stirs in those deep depressions through which the merest thread
of milky water trickles disconsolately. The sun blazes overhead and
hours pass, while you trudge through the fiery inferno; scintillations
of heat rise from the stones and still you crawl onwards, breathless and
footsore, till eyes are dazed and senses reel. One may well say bad
things of these torrid deserts of pebbles which, up till lately, were
the only highways from the lowlands into the mountainous parts. But they
are sweet in memory. One calls to mind the wild savours that hang in
the stagnant air; the cloven hill-sides, seamed with gorgeous patches of
russet and purple and green; the spectral tamarisks, and the glory of
coral-tinted oleanders rising in solitary tufts of beauty, or flaming
congregations, out of the pallid waste of boulders.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 443 of 488
Words from 119029 to 119297
of 131203
