ench, insects were buzzing about, shining in
the sun like buds of gold. Some hens, belonging to the Hermitage, were
pecking away in one corner of the square, clucking, and dusting their
feathers in the gravel.

Rafael surrendered to the charm of the exquisite scene. With reason had
it been called "Paradise" by its ancient owners, Moors from the magic
gardens of Bagdad, accustomed to the splendors of _The Thousand and One
Nights_, but who went into ecstacies nevertheless on beholding for the
first time the wondrous _ribera_ of Valencia!

Throughout the great valley, orange groves, extending like shimmering
waves of velvet; hedges and enclosures of lighter green, cutting the
crimson earth into geometric figures; clumps of palms spurting like jets
of verdure upward toward the sky, and falling off again in languorous
swoons; villas blue and rose-colored, nestling in flowering gardens;
white farmhouses half concealed behind green swirls of forest; spindling
smokestacks of irrigation engines, with yellow sooty tops; Alcira, its
houses clustered on the island and overflowing to the opposite bank, all
of whitish, bony hue, pock-marked with tiny windows; beyond, Carcagente,
the rival city, girdled in its belt of leafy orchards; off toward the
sea, sharp, angular mountains, with outlines that from afar suggested
the fantastic castles imagined by Dore; and inland, the towns of the
upper _ribera_ floating in an emerald lake of orchard, the distant
mountains taking on a violet hue from the setting sun that was creeping
like a bristly porcupine of gold into the hot vapors of the horizon.

Behind the Hermitage all the lower _ribera_ stretched, one expanse of
rice-fields drowned under an artificial flood; then, Sueca and Cullera,
their white houses perched on those fecund lagoons like towns in
landscapes of India; then, Albufera, with its lake, a sheet of silver
glistening in the sunlight; then, Valencia, like a cloud of smoke
drifting along the base of a mountain range of hazy blue; and, at last,
in the background, the halo, as it were, of this apotheosis of light and
color, the Mediterranean--the palpitant azure Gulf bounded by the cape
of San Antonio and the peaks of Sagunto and Almenara, that jutted up
against the sky-line like the black fins of giant whales.

As Rafael looked down upon the towers of the crumbling convent of La
Murta, almost hidden in its pine-groves, he thought of all the tragedy
of the Reconquest; and almost m