"Hanbury-land? I never heard of it. Is it a little independent principality like Monacoa? But how funny it should have an English-sounding name sandwiched in right here between Italy and France."
"The lord of the land is an Englishman, and a benevolent one, a sort of fairy god-father to the poor in all the country round," I explained. "You won't find Hanbury-land mentioned on the map; nevertheless it's very real, fortunately for its inhabitants; and here's the gate of the garden which leads to the royal palace. La Mortola is a great show place, for the public are allowed to go in on certain days. I forget if this is one of them, but perhaps they will let us see the garden, nevertheless. Shall I ask?"
It was in my mind that, if we stopped, we might miss the Prince as well as see the garden, so that we should be killing two birds with one stone, and I was glad when the Countess caught eagerly at the suggestion that we should beg for a glimpse of La Mortola, a place famed throughout Europe.
Permission was given; the big iron gates swung open to admit us. We entered, and a moment later were descending a long flight of stone steps to terraces far below the level of the road where the car stood waiting our return.
Had Aladdin rubbed his lamp in the days before his unfortunate misunderstanding with the Geni and demanded the most beautiful of gardens, the fulfilment of his wish could have taken no fairer form than this. Strange, tropical flowers, vivid as flame, burned in green recesses; water-sprites upset their caskets of pearls over rock-shelves into translucent pools where lilies lay asleep, dreaming of their own pale beauty. Long, green pergolas, starred with flowers, framed blue-veiled pictures of distant coast-line, and mediæval strongholds, coloured with the same burnt umber as the hills on which they stood, gloomed and glowed across a cobalt sea.
There is nothing that pleases the normal male more than to be able to point out objects worthy of interest or admiration to the female of his kind. Since time immemorial, have not landscape-pictures in books of travel been filled in, in the foreground, with the figures of men showing the scenery to women? Did any one ever see such a work of art representing a woman as indicating any point of view to a man? No doubt many could have done so; and the ladies in the pictures had probably noticed the objects in question before their male escorts pointed to them; but knowing the amiable weakness of the other sex, they politely refrained from saying, "Oh, we saw that long ago."
Thus did Terry and I, after the conventional traditions of our species, lead our little party through avenues of cypresses, to open rock-spaces, or among a waving sea of roses to battle-grounds of rare cacti, with writhing arms like octopi transformed into plants.
Here, peering down into a kind of dyke, paved with rough tesselation, we vied with each other in telling our charges that this was the old Roman road to Gaul, the Aurelian Way, over which Julius Cæsar, St. Catherine of Siena, Dante, and other great ones passed. Then we showed them one of Napoleon's old guns, covered with shells, as when it was fished out of the sea. We enlarged upon the fact that there was no tree, shrub, or blossom on the known face of the earth of which a specimen did not grow at La Mortola; and when we had wandered for an hour in the garden without seeing half there was to see, we climbed the long flight of steps again, congratulating ourselves—Terry and I—that we had played Dalmar-Kalm rather a neat trick. The crowd of villagers who had clustered round our car outside the entrance gates would screen it from the Prince as he flashed by, and he would go on and on, wondering how we had contrived to get so far ahead.
Our way would take us, after passing through Ventimiglia, up the Roya Valley which Terry had decided upon as a route because of its wild and unspoiled beauty, different from anything that our passengers could have seen in their brief experience of the Riviera. But as there were no inns which offered decent entertainment for man or automobile within reasonable distance, we were to lunch at Ventimiglia, and no arrangement had been made with Dalmar-Kalm concerning this halt. His confidence—perhaps well founded—in the superiority of his speed over ours had led him to believe that he could pause at our side for consultation whenever he wished. Therefore, we had left Cap Martin without much discussion of plans. Mrs. Kidder was of opinion that we would find him waiting in front of the "best hotel in Ventimiglia," with an excellent luncheon ordered.
"The best hotel in Ventimiglia!" poor lady, she had an awakening before her. Not only was there no Prince, but there was no best hotel. Old Ventimiglia, in its huddled picturesqueness, must delight any man with eyes in his head; new Ventimiglia must disgust any man with a vacancy under his belt. As we sat in the shabby dining-room of a seventh-rate inn (where the flies set an example of attentiveness the waiters did not follow), pretending to eat macaroni hard as walking-sticks and veal reduced to chiffons, I feared the courage of our employers would fail. They could never, in all their well-ordered American lives, have known anything so abominable as this experience into which we had lured them, promising a pilgrimage of pleasure. But the charmingly dressed beings, who looked like birds of paradise alighted by mistake in a pigsty, made sport of the squalor which we had expected to evoke their rage.