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The beautiful mosques, with their graceful minarets the palaces and harems, kiosks and great barracks the gardens, shrubberies, and cypress-woods the gaily painted houses, among which single cypresses often rear their slender heads, these, together with the immense forest of masts, combine to form an indescribably striking spectacle.
'What is the good of it all? he asked himself inconsequently this monotonous, restless, stupid life to which he was soon to be returning, and for good. He began to realize how ludicrous a spectacle he must be, kneeling here amid the weeds and grass beneath the solemn cypresses. 'Well, you can't have everything, seemed loosely to express his disquiet.
Farther back, ragged cypresses and cedars, half obscured by the drifting haze of spray, climbed the sides of the gorge, and beyond rose the dim, rounded summits of treeless hills. There were streaks of snow on some of them, for winter threatened to close in unusually early.
Grapes, mulberries, rice, and stuff called maize, which looked exactly like our American corn, grew together like a happy family of sisters, and from the hills dotted about, more thickly than Mamma's crowns on her toilet things, looked down old feudal castles as melancholy as the cypresses that stood beside them, like the sole friends of their adversity.
The beds were intersected by furrows; in each trench there stood, as if on guard, ranks of hemp stalks, the cypresses of the vegetable garden, calm, straight, and green; their leaves and their scent served to defend the beds, for through their leaves no serpent dares to press, and their scent kills insects and caterpillars.
Italian cypresses are hard to transplant, particularly if their feet have become accustomed to the peaceful conditions of Santa Clara Valley cemeteries, where most of them, I understand, enjoyed an undisturbed existence until they were used so very effectively in the Exposition.
Above the mudwalls jutted the turrets and the cypresses of San Isidro cemetery; a round cupola stood out clearly in the atmosphere; at its top rose an angel with wings outspread, as if about to take flight against the flaming, blood-red background of evening.
Vanno hoped that he might find Mary in the garden; for mounting from lower to higher levels, above the cypresses and olives which formed a wind screen for upper terraces near the house, he saw viewpoints furnished with seats of old, carved marble, pergolas roofed with masses of banksia, and one long arbour, darkly green, with crimson camelias flaming at the far end like a magic lamp.
The ivy-grown city-wall, a group of fine cypresses, a few stone-pines with their lovely velvet-like verdure, the gray old pyramid of Caius Cestius immediately behind the cemetery, and a glimpse of the dreamy-looking Alban Hills on the farther side of the Campagna, make up a landscape which no artistic eye can rest on without being deeply penetrated by the charm of it.
We had rushed in to the right bank, and found on ascending it, that the reeds with which it had hitherto been lined, had partially ceased. A large plain, similar to those over which we had wandered prior to our gaining the flooded region, stretched away to a considerable distance behind us, and was backed by cypresses and brush.
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