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Updated: May 8, 2025
Our steps were towards the "Shell Road," and soon our feet crunched upon the fragments of unios and bivalves that strewed the path. Here was a scene more in unison with our thoughts. Above and around waved the dark solemn cypress-trees, fit emblems of grief rendered doubly lugubrious in their expression by the hoary tillandsia, that draped them like a couch of the dead.
On the East Bank the old houses of Būlak rise from the water's edge, and continue in a series of old houses and palaces to the southern end of Rhoda Island, whose tall palms and cypress-trees rise above the silvery mist which still hangs upon the water. On the west the high mud-banks are crowned with palms and lebbek-trees as far as one can see.
The occasion is too good not to find out, under better conditions as regards approach, what the inhabitant of the cypress-trees has already shown me. The next morning, I cut the telegraph-wire, this time as long as one's arm and held, like yesterday, by one of the hind-legs stretched outside the cabin. I then place on the web a double prey, a Dragon-fly and a Locust.
The young man often and often stood at the window, and looked out upon the sea, and down into the cypress-trees, among the thick branches of which he heard the doves cooing. He loved to hear them coo, and so did the little old monk.
Other peoples paint from Nature: the Italians collaborate with her: they paint with sunlight. The music of color. All is music, everything sings. A wall by the roadside, red, fissured with gold: above it, two cypress-trees with their tufted crests: and all around the eager blue of the sky. A marble staircase, white, steep, narrow, climbing between pink walls against the blue front of a church.
At length, after mounting a long rise, they came to a palace on a mount, facing the vast, red-walled fortress which seemed to dominate the place, which he afterwards knew as the Alhambra, but separated from it by a valley. This palace was a very great building, set on three sides of a square, and surrounded by gardens, wherein tall cypress-trees pointed to the tender sky.
It had been the gallery of some palazzo in old days, was above one hundred feet in length, fairly broad, with a roof of wooden rafters and large windows opening on a courtyard garden. I could see the tops of three cypress-trees cutting the grey sky upon a level with us. A long table occupied the centre of this room. It had been laid for upwards of forty persons, and we filled it.
In a lonely spot, quite away from the crowd and the glare, we came upon an exquisite little plot of garden with growing flowers, shrubs, and cypress-trees, tended, one could see, with loving care, "and in the garden there is a sepulchre."
A village among the trees is mirrored in the river. There are cypress-trees, and the crosses of the cemetery showing above the white wall washed by the stream. Then there are rocks, a mountain gorge, vines on the slopes, a little pine-wood, and ruined castles.... And once more the plain, corn, birds, and the sun....
There, too, is the Villa d'Este, deserted and decaying among groves of melancholy pine and cypress-trees, where it seems to lie in state. We saw its ruined amphitheater on a gray, dull day, when a shrill March wind was blowing, and when the scattered stones of the old city lay strewn about the lonely eminence, as desolate and dead as the ashes of a long-extinguished fire.
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