weather. There were no snowdrops. I had found the day before a bank of
crocuses, pale, fragile, lilac-coloured flowers with dark veins,
pricking up keenly like myriad little lilac-coloured flames among the
grass, under the olive trees. And I wanted very much to find the
snowdrops hanging in the gloom. But there were not any.
I gathered a handful of primroses, then I climbed suddenly, quickly out
of the deep watercourse, anxious to get back to the sunshine before the
evening fell. Up above I saw the olive trees in the sunny golden grass,
and sunlit grey rocks immensely high up. I was afraid lest the evening
would fall whilst I was groping about like an otter in the damp and the
darkness, that the day of sunshine would be over.
Soon I was up in the sunshine again, on the turf under the olive trees,
reassured. It was the upper world of glowing light, and I was
safe again.
All the olives were gathered, and the mills were going night and day,
making a great, acrid scent of olive oil in preparation, by the lake.
The little stream rattled down. A mule driver 'Hued!' to his mules on
the Strada Vecchia. High up, on the Strada Nuova, the beautiful, new,
military high-road, which winds with beautiful curves up the
mountain-side, crossing the same stream several times in clear-leaping
bridges, travelling cut out of sheer slope high above the lake, winding
beautifully and gracefully forward to the Austrian frontier, where it
ends: high up on the lovely swinging road, in the strong evening
sunshine, I saw a bullock wagon moving like a vision, though the
clanking of the wagon and the crack of the bullock whip responded close
in my ears.
Everything was clear and sun-coloured up there, clear-grey rocks
partaking of the sky, tawny grass and scrub, browny-green spires of
cypresses, and then the mist of grey-green olives fuming down to the
lake-side. There was no shadow, only clear sun-substance built up to the
sky, a bullock wagon moving slowly in the high sunlight, along the
uppermost terrace of the military road. It sat in the warm stillness of
the transcendent afternoon.
The four o'clock steamer was creeping down the lake from the Austrian
end, creeping under the cliffs. Far away, the Verona side, beyond the
Island, lay fused in dim gold. The mountain opposite was so still, that
my heart seemed to fade in its beating as if it too would be still. All
was perfectly still, pure substance. The little steamer on the floor of
the world below, the mules down the road cast no shadow. They too were
pure sun-substance travelling on the surface of the sun-made world.
A cricket hopped near me. Then I remembered that it was Saturday
afternoon, when a strange suspension comes over the world. And then,
just below me, I saw two monks walking in their garden between the
naked, bony vines, walking in their wintry garden of bony vines and
olive trees, their brown cassocks passing between the brown vine-stocks,
their heads bare to the sunshine, sometimes a glint of light as their
feet strode from under their skirts.
It was so still, everything so perfectly suspended, that I felt them
talking. They marched with the peculiar march of monks, a long, loping
stride, their heads together, their skirts swaying slowly, two brown
monks with hidden hands, sliding under the bony vines and beside the
cabbages, their heads always together in hidden converse. It was as if I
were attending with my dark soul to their inaudible undertone. All the
time I sat still in silence, I was one with them, a partaker, though I
could hear no sound of their voices. I went with the long stride of
their skirted feet, that slid springless and noiseless from end to end
of the garden, and back again. Their hands were kept down at their
sides, hidden in the long sleeves, and the skirts of their robes. They
did not touch each other, nor gesticulate as they walked. There was no
motion save the long, furtive stride and the heads leaning together. Yet
there was an eagerness in their conversation. Almost like
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