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Updated: June 17, 2025
Now they rode up a long slope, and at its crest paused to look upon a marvellous scene. Below them stretched a vast plain, full of villages, cornfields, olive-groves, and vineyards. In the centre of this plain, some fifteen miles away, rose a great mountain, which seemed to be walled all about.
The whole of this long vega is a garden, thick with olive-groves and orange trees, with orchards of nespole and palms and almonds, with fig-trees and locust-trees, with judas-trees that blush in spring, and with flowers as multitudinously brilliant as the fretwork of sunset clouds."
The shores of the bay were enlivened with olive-groves and the gleam of the villages, while here and there a single palm dreamed of its brothers across the sea. Etna, of course, had the monarch's place in the landscape, but even his large, magnificent outlines could not usurp all my feeling.
The coast of Morea faces the north; so dense shadows still rested on the stony olive-groves and the dark foliage of the pink laurel and oleander bushes, whose dense clumps followed the course of the stream and filled the ravines. How still, how pleasant it usually was here in the early morning!
I suppose I looked surprised; I certainly felt so, for nothing was further from my thoughts than a visit to Italy. Heliobas smiled, and said in a tone that was almost gay: "Shall I draw the picture for you? I see a fair city, deep embowered in hills and sheltered by olive-groves. Over it beams a broad sky, deeply blue; many soft bells caress the summer air.
They know, Monsieur, that above all things I love poetry, especially that which brings tears into the eyes." "Ah, I know," said I with a smile, "you are poetical as the winds which sigh amid your olive-groves, or the dews which drip from your fig trees." "No, Monsieur, I am only a mantua-maker a poor seamstress in ... street, in Aix, the name of which I am almost ashamed to tell you.
He wandered on very slowly and feebly till he came to a broad square, from which, in the vista, might be seen one of the principal gates of Florence, and the fig-trees and olive-groves beyond, it was then that a Pilgrim of tall stature approached towards him as from the gate; his hood was thrown back, and gave to view a countenance of great but sad command; a face, in whose high features, massive brow, and proud, unshrinking gaze, shaded by an expression of melancholy more stern than soft, Nature seemed to have written majesty, and Fate disaster.
In his eye, the vines, the fig-trees, and the olive-groves, with which the limestone cliffs of Judea were once covered, identified themselves with the richest returns of agricultural wealth, and more than compensated for the absence of those spreading fields waving with corn which are necessary to convey to the mind of a European the ideas of fruitfulness, comfort, and abundance.
I was unexpectedly fortunate in finding that the bright weather had freed the road over the pass from snow, and I had a perfect day, with still air, for that part of my ride. About halfway between Kasvin and Resht the road passes through the extensive olive-groves of Rudbar, which for many centuries has been the centre of a flourishing olive-oil and soap business.
I had hills to climb now, and at the top of each expected to see the town, but every time was disappointed. The traces of man surrounded me at last; again I rode among olive-groves and cornfields; the highway now was bordered with straggling aloes and with hedges of cactus. At last!
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