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It is enclosed and covered with cypress-trees, the deeper shade of which makes it darker and gloomier than at the sides, but the inner circles for there are more than one are quite open to the sunshine. Even roses grow there, and the warmth of the sun is delightful as a change from the cool of the shade.
The sun itself was sinking to rest behind the western hills, and sent a farewell smile of love into the east, that it might glance on the lowering bier. The distant mountains hid their faces in a misty veil, and the tall cypress-trees of the cemetery swayed and sighed as Nature's special mourners for her favored child; and there they are to stand keeping watch over her.
From this peninsula there was no communication with the interior except by a small flatboat which plied across Reelfoot Lake, more than a mile across, by a channel cut through the cypress-trees which cover the lake. Supplies and reinforcements could not, therefore, be brought to any considerable extent by the land side; nor could escape, except by small parties, be made in that direction.
The principal entrance to the garden is more elaborate and beautiful than the fronts of many noted mosques, for it is adorned with towers crowned with cupolas. Entering the enclosure, and walking along the avenue of cypress-trees, one obtains his first view of the great dome of the Taj. It looks like about three-fourths of a globe, capped with a slender spire.
Farther on, as I wound round along the base of a hill which fell down upon the road by precipitous cliffs of brown earth, I saw a gray, ruined wall on the summit, surrounded with cypress-trees. This tree is very frequent about Siena, and the scenery is made soft and beautiful by a variety of other trees and shrubbery, without which these hills and gorges would have scarcely a charm.
It is covered with turf, having tall cypress-trees at the corners, and a little cross in the centre. The arcade is pierced with sixty-two windows, and contains on its marble pavement hundreds of monuments among them the Greek sarcophagi studied by Nicola Pisano.
It was a veritable place of Eastern delight and dreams, such as Peter had never known before he looked upon it on that languorous eve he who had not seen the sky or flowers for so many weary weeks of sickness. It was secluded also, being surrounded by a high wall, but at one place the tall, windowless tower of some other building of red stone soared up between and beyond two lofty cypress-trees.
He who would carry away the idea of a magnificent city, which the exterior of Verona suggests, must go round it, not through it. The first step within its walls is like the stroke of an enchanter's wand. The villa-begemmed city, with its ramparts and its cypress-trees, takes flight, and there rises before the traveller an old ruinous town, with dirty streets and a ragged and lazy population.
Progress was slow and painful. The oppressive afternoon was half spent when a breeze started up, the precursor of a thunder-gust. The breeze, strengthening to a brisk gale, made Arlington hold fast to his hat, and caused the long streamers of Spanish moss to wave like gray banners from the limbs of the cypress-trees. The air grew murky, clouds were flying in dark blotches.
The fortress occupies a very commanding position, standing upon a rocky upheaval some two hundred feet above the surrounding plain, thus rising abruptly out of the marshy swamp. It is encircled by a beautiful park composed mostly of old cypress-trees, many of which are draped in gray Spanish moss, as soft and suggestive an adornment as that of the moss-rose.
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