round bays along the shore to the
hazy horizon where the blue of the sea and the blue of the sky melt
together; red or white sails, like birds with a single wing spread to
the breeze, the slender silhouettes of steamers with a little smoke
trailing behind like a farewell, and along the beaches, of which you
catch glimpses as the road winds, fishermen no larger than sea-mews in
their boats, lying at anchor, which look like nests. Then the road
descends, follows a rapid downward slope along the base of cliffs and
headlands almost perpendicular. The cool breeze from the water reaches
you there, blends with the thousand little bells on the harnesses, while
at the right, on the mountain-side, the pines and green oaks rise tier
above tier, with gnarled roots protruding from the sterile soil, and
cultivated olive-trees in terraces, as far as a broad ravine, white and
rocky, bordered with green plants which tell of the passage of the
waters, the dry bed of a torrent up which toil laden mules, sure of
their footing among the loose shingle, where a washerwoman stoops beside
a microscopic pool, a few drops remaining from the great winter
freshets. From time to time you rumble through the one street of a
village, or rather of a small town of historic antiquity, grown rusty
with too much sunshine, the houses crowded closely together and
connected by dark archways, a network of covered lanes which climb the
sheer cliff with snatches of light from above, openings like the mouths
of mines affording glimpses of broods of children with curly hair like a
halo about their heads, baskets of luscious fruit, a woman descending
the rough pavements with a pitcher on her head or a distaff in her hand.
Then, at a corner of the street, the blue twinkling of the waves,
immensity once more.

But as the day wore on, the sun, mounting higher in the heavens,
scattered its beams over the sea just emerging from its mists, heavy
with sleep, dazed, motionless, with a quartz-like transparence, and
myriads of rays fell upon the water as if arrow-points had pricked it,
making a dazzling reflection, doubled in intensity by the whiteness of
the cliffs and the soil, by a veritable African sirocco which raised the
dust in a spiral column as the carriage passed. They reached the
hottest, the most sheltered portions of the Corniche,--a genuinely
tropical temperature, where dates, cactus, the aloe, with its tall,
candelabra-like branches, grow in the fields. When h