The
garden was in fact very pretty, though whether it was worth fifteen
pesetas and three hours coming to see the reader must decide for himself
when he does it. I think it was, myself, and I would like to be there
now, sitting in a shell-covered cement chair at the villa steps, and
letting the landscape unroll itself wonderfully before me. We were on a
shore of that ocean of olives which in southern Spain washes far up the
mountain walls of the blue and bluer distances, and which we were to
skirt more and more in bay and inlet and widening and narrowing expanses
throughout Andalusia. Before we left it we wearied utterly of it, and in
fact the olive of Spain is not the sympathetic olive of Italy, though I
should think it a much more practical and profitable tree. It is not
planted so much at haphazard as the Italian olive seems to be; its mass
looks less like an old apple orchard than the Italian; its regular
succession is a march of trim files as far as the horizon or the
hillsides, which they often climbed to the top. We were in the season of
the olive harvest, and throughout the month of October its nearer lines
showed the sturdy trees weighed down by the dense fruit, sometimes very
small, sometimes as large as pigeon eggs.
Pages:
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270