apparently they had been underneath him all
night.

"I thought the ground felt even pricklier than usual," he commented. "I
do have such dreadfully bad luck, don't I. Crumbs, Rodney? They're quite
good, for crumbs. Better than crusts, anyhow. I should think even you
could eat crumbs without pampering yourself. And if crumbs then tea, or
you'll choke. Here you are."

He poured tea into two collapsible cups and passed one to Rodney, who had
been discoursing for some time on his special topic, the art of doing
without.

Then Peter, drinking tea and munching crumbs, sat up in his bag and
looked at what Rodney described as the morning. He saw how the long,
pointed olive leaves stood with sharp edges against pale light; how
the silver screen was, if one looked into it, a thing of magic details
of delight, of manifold shapes and sharp little shadowings and delicate
tracery; how gnarled stems were light-touched and shadow-touched and
silver and black; how the night was delicate, marvellous, a radiant
wonder of clear loveliness, illustrated by a large white moon. Peter
saw it and smiled. He did not see Rodney's world, but his own.

But both saw how the large moon dipped and dipped. Soon it would dip
below the dim land's rim, and the olive trees would be blurred and
twisted shadows in a still shadow-world.

"Then," said Peter dreamily, "we shall be able to go to sleep again."

Rodney pulled him out of his bag and firmly rolled it up.

"Twelve kilometres from breakfast. Thirty from tea. No, we don't tea
before Florence. Go and wash."

They washed in a copper bucket that hung beside a pulley well. It was
rather fun washing, till Peter let the bucket slip off the hook and
gurgle down to the bottom. Then it was rather fun fishing for it with
the hook, but it was not caught, and they abandoned it in sudden alarm at
a distant sound, and hastily scrambled out of the olive garden onto the
white road.

Beneath their feet lay the thick soft dust, unstirred as yet by the day's
journeyings. The wayfaring smell of it caught at their breath. Before
them the pale road wound and wound, between the silver secrecy of the
olive woods, towards the journeying moon that dipped above a far and
hidden city in the west. Then a dim horizon took the dipping moon, and
there remained a grey road that smelt of dust and ran between shadowed
gardens that showed no more their eternal silver, but gnarled and twisted
stems that mocked and leered.

On