Once we came to a
battlemented tomb, of mighty girth and height, as perdurable in its
masonry as the naked, stony hills that in the distance propped the
mountains fainting along the horizon under their burden of snow.
But as
we drew nearer Tivoli the hills drew nearer us, and now they were no
longer naked, but densely covered with the gray, interminable stretch of
the olive forests. The olive is the tree which, of all others, is the
friend of civilized man; it is older and kinder even than the apple,
which is its next rival in beneficence; but these two kinds are so like
each other, in the mass, that this boundless forest of olives around
Tivoli offered an image of all the aggregated apple-orchards in the
world. Where the trees came closest to the road they seemed to watch our
passing, each with its trunk aslant and its branches akimbo, in a
humorous make-believe of being in some joke with us, like so many
gnarled and twisted apple-trees, used to children's play-fellowship. You
felt a racial intimacy with the whimsical and antic shapes which your
brief personal consciousness denied in vain; and you rose among the
slopes around Tivoli with a sense of home-coming from the desert of the
Campagna. But in the distance to which the olive forests stretched they
lost this effect of tricksy familiarity. They looked like a gray sea
against the horizon; more fantastically yet, they seemed a vast hoar
silence, full of mystery and loneliness.
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