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Updated: May 15, 2025
The winding road led me up the flanks of stony hills, terraced everywhere for almond-trees; but after two or three hours of ascent the almonds dwindled away, and the country became an absolute desert of brashy hills, showing little asperity of outline, but mournful and solemn by their wastefulness and abandonment to a degree that makes the traveller ask himself if he is really in Europe, or has been transported by magic to the most arid steppes of Asia.
He did not doubt the stories had been told in Babylon, Nineveh, and Damascus, and he might think of the people in those cities sitting in the calm evenings under the almond-trees on the banks of the Euphrates or the river Abana listening to the story-teller, who probably did his best to make the story entertaining. "Doubtless," said Mr.
The olive orchards of Sampaolo are just so many wildernesses of wild flowers: violets, anemones, narcissus; irises, white ones and purple ones; daffodils, which we call asphodels; hyacinths, tulips, arums, orchids oh, but a perfect riot of wild flowers. In the spring the valleys of Sampaolo are pink with blossoming peach-trees and almond-trees, where they are not scarlet with pomegranates.
Miette, with a woman's lack of scruple, did not hesitate to pluck a bunch of grapes, or a cluster of green almonds, from the vines and almond-trees whose boughs brushed her as she passed; and at this Silvere, with his absolute ideas of honesty, felt vexed, although he did not venture to find fault with the girl, whose occasional sulking distressed him.
"I flew about beneath the green palms and the blossoming almond-trees," sang the Canary; "I flew around, with my brothers and sisters, over the beautiful flowers, and over the glassy lakes, where the bright water-plants nodded to me from below. There, too, I saw many splendidly-dressed paroquets, that told the drollest stories, and the wildest fairy tales without end."
Down dale and up hill we journeyed; bright green of almond-trees, dark green of carob-trees, snowy blossoms of apricot-trees, rosy blossoms of peach-trees, argent verdure of olive-trees, adorning the valleys.
If ever a northern wanderer could be suddenly transported to look down upon the Piano di Sorrento, he would not doubt that he saw the Garden of the Hesperides. The orange-trees cannot well be fuller: their branches bend with the weight of fruit. With the almond-trees in full flower, and with the silver sheen of the olive leaves, the oranges are apples of gold in pictures of silver.
But there are other times when everything seems primitive, when the ancient stars are only sparks blown from a boy's bonfire, when the whole earth seems so young and experimental that even the white hair of the aged, in the fine biblical phrase, is like almond-trees that blossom, like the white hawthorn grown in May.
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.
The hedges are putting forth their leaves, the almond-trees are in full blossom, and in the vineyards the contadini are setting cane-poles and trimming the vines to run upon them. Here and there, along the slopes, the rude old plough of the Georgics, dragged by great gray oxen, turns up the rich loam, that "needs only to be tickled to laugh out in flowers and grain."
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