Nel’ Ombra E Pace.”
And finally they mounted the little tiled and columned belvedere hanging at the corner of the garden’s lofty wall to gaze upon a view unrivalled of this most beautifully placed city.
Palermo lay stretched before them in its plain of the Conca d’Oro—the golden shell. Round it as a garland rose a semicircle of vapoury mountains like rosy-purple clouds, bending on beyond the plain on either side to clasp a bay of dazzling violet whose waters glowed at the city’s feet; the city itself warmly cream-tinted and roofed with dull red tiles. A city towered, columned, arched; with here the ruddy bubbles of San Giovanni degli Eremiti’s domes, there the tall spires and fretted crest of the Cathedral; and flowing through it all, or resting here and there in pools, the green of orange groves, the flushing mist of Judas-trees, the long stream of verdant parks and gardens.
“Not only is this the loveliest city in the whole world,” said Jane, “but this is also the sweetest of all gardens, and a curious thing is that we seem to have it quite to ourselves. You’d suppose all Palermo would want to come here for at least half of every day, but not a soul have we met except those two dear, queer old gardeners sitting on the tank’s edge playing a game with orange seeds.”
“Well, if the Palermians haven’t intelligence enough to use such a garden, we have,” announced Peripatetica. “And we will come here every day.”
Which they did for a while; bringing their fountain pens to write letters in the bosco, or resting after sight-seeing in the cool shade of the cypress ring. And it might have served them to the end as their intimate joy had it not been for Peripatetica’s insane passion for gardening.
“Sicily’s Picture-book, The Painted Cart”
All about the edge of the long tapis vert which lay before the handsome building at the end of the garden—a building which they supposed housed some lucky park official—stood at intervals fine standard roses. Now one unlucky day Peripatetica descried aphides upon the delicate shoots and young buds of these standards. That was sufficient. An aphis, to her rose-growing mind, is a noxious wild beast, and promptly stripping off her gloves she ravened among them.
“Perhaps you’d better leave them alone,” warned Jane in a whisper. “The gardeners look so surprised.”