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Updated: June 16, 2025
"All this within a hundred miles of London," he said. "Looks as if it had had nervous prostration, too." The footpath turned the shoulder of a slope, through a thicket of rank rhododendrons, and crossed what had once been a carriage drive, which ended in the shadow of two gigantic holm-oaks. "A house!" said Sophie, in a whisper. "A Colonial house!"
In the meantime Marcus had been having adventures. His pasture was on a grassy plateau of a mountain slope, edged by heavy green cypresses and dotted with holm-oaks. In the woods above him chestnut and walnut trees showed vividly against the silver olives. Below stretched the shining waters of the Larian Lake. Here, while the sheep browsed happily, he was wont to feed his little soul on dreams.
Four leagues from Blois, and one league from the Loire, in a small and deep valley, between marshy swamps and a forest of large holm-oaks, far from any highroad, the traveller suddenly comes upon a royal, nay, a magic castle.
Her mole-hills, those humble mounds any two of which would go easily into a Hen's egg, rise innumerous in my path, the path by the almond-trees which is the happy hunting-ground of my curiosity to-day. This path is a ribbon of road three paces wide, worn into ruts by the Mule's hoofs and the wheels of the farm-carts. A coppice of holm-oaks shelters it from the north wind.
Four leagues from Blois, and one league from the Loire, in a small and deep valley, between marshy swamps and a forest of large holm-oaks, far from any highroad, the traveller suddenly comes upon a royal, nay, a magic castle.
It was a wilderness, he says, with savannas of palm-trees, inhabited by savages. On horseback, he traversed a virgin forest, obliged to bend over his horse's neck to avoid the huge branches of holm-oaks and cork-trees, and laurels and heather that were thirty feet high. In one canton he found people naked, except for a waist-cloth, and living on coarse bread made from acorns mixed with clay.
There had they iron, both in pigs and forged scrap and nails; steel they had, and silver, both in ingots and vessel; pearls from over sea; cinnabar and other colours for staining, such as were not in the mountains: madder from the marshes, and purple of the sea, and scarlet grain from the holm-oaks by its edge, and woad from the deep clayey fields of the plain; silken thread also from the outer ocean, and rare webs of silk, and jars of olive oil, and fine pottery, and scented woods, and sugar of the cane.
Leaving Lieutenant Amir to map the principal ruins, we followed the caravan up the Majra el-Waghir, the long divide rising to the west-north-west. The thin forest reminded me of the wooded slopes of the Anti-Libanus about El-Kunaytarah: there, however, terebinths and holm-oaks take the place of these unlovely and uncomfortable thorn-trees.
From this garden one climbs by two staircases of flint, one on either side, to a forest of cypresses, fir-trees, holm-oaks, laurels, and other evergreen trees, distributed with beautiful order, in the middle of which, according to Tribolo's design, there was to be a most lovely fish-pond, which has since been made.
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