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Updated: May 15, 2025
All besides was a scream, quite as unintelligible as the warbling of the canary-bird, excepting to the clerk, who being now a bird, could understand his comrades very well. "I flew beneath green palm-trees, and amidst the blooming almond-trees," sang the canary.
And when I had slept, and rose to wash in a room near the overhanging latticed balcony of the façade, before me to the north lay old Galata in sunshine, and that steep large street mounting to Pera, once full at every night-fall of divans on which grave dervishes smoked narghiles, and there was no space for passage, for all was divans, lounges, almond-trees, heaven-high hum, chibouques in forests, the dervish, and the innumerable porter, the horse-hirer with his horse from Tophana, and arsenal-men from Kassim, and traders from Galata, and artillery-workmen from Tophana; and on the other side of the house, the south end, a covered bridge led across a street, which consisted mostly of two immense blind walls, into a great tangled wilderness of flowers, which was the harem-garden, where I passed some hours; and here I might have remained many days, many weeks perhaps, but that, dozing one fore-day with those fancied others, it was as if there occurred a laugh somewhere, and a thing said: 'But this city is not quite dead! waking me from deeps of peace to startled wakefulness.
The good dame busily prepared the best fare her stores supplied, milk, figs, and peaches, deeply regretting that the bleak winds had nipped her almond-trees. Sir Huon thought he had never in his life tasted any fare so good. The old lady talked while her guests ate.
A bloom, palely pink as the flowers that began to flush the almond-trees, came upon her delicate beauty, a light like that of the lengthening days dawned in her eyes. She had an instinct for the earliest violets among the grass under the olives; she was first to hear the blackcaps singing in the garden-tops; and nothing that was novel in her experience seemed alien to it.
The wind rose with our ascent of every elevation, if it did not fall with our return to a lower level; on the Janiculum it blew a blizzard in which the incongruous ilexes and laurels bowed and writhed, and some groups of almond-trees in their pale bloom on a distant upland mocked us with a derisive image of spring.
It was in the spring-time, and the peach-trees and almond-trees hung full of blossoms and bees, the lizards lay in the walks absorbing the vernal sunshine, the violets and cowslips sweetened all the grassy borders.
For the first four nights of his wandering he had not known where he was going, but on this fifth night he discovered. He was on the way to Bethlehem beautiful little Bethlehem curving on the crest of the Judean mountains and smiling down upon the fairness of the fairest of sweet valleys, rich with vines and figs and olives and almond-trees.
The almond-trees were in leaf; the hawthorn in blossom; the fig-trees were putting forth their tender green. A slowly ascending road brought us to the hill of Mâr Elyâs, and the so-called Well of the Magi. Here the legend says the Wise Men halted after they had left Jerusalem, and the star reappeared to guide them on to Bethlehem.
The trip thither is most enjoyable to a stranger, for the glimpse it gives him of the tropical character and the rank fertility of this region. On the way one passes through a floral paradise, where flowers of every hue and teeming with fragrance line the way. Almond-trees, yielding grateful shade, and the Ponciana regia, blazing with gorgeous flowers, are in strong contrast to each other.
The castle at the end of the quay, the Castel del Camerlengho, was built in 1424. It is very well preserved. The three smaller angle towers have been altered for cannon. It is now a store-house for sand and such things, with a small garden and a few almond-trees. In the corner is a little chapel nearly covered by the sand, and I was told there was a shallow cistern in the middle.
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