The convent, old and grey, its walls encrusted with damp and half hidden by clustering weeds, was a strongly built edifice, overlooking the very edge of the precipitous slope, and bearing the usual mixed likeness to a church and a fortress.
It looked sad, silent, and deserted now; and was a strange contrast to a gaudy but handsome little family chapel in course of erection a few yards off.
This was built of black and white marble, Florentine fashion, with an enormous crucifix inside, and family shields outside the walls, with here and there niches for the coffins of its owner's family.
A little lower down the road is a rough-looking farmhouse, where lodgings are let in summer to those of the Ajaccio élite who care to rough it in this lovely scenery.
As we turned homewards, the shadows were retreating from the roadway, and the sun's power was growing intense.
We were glad to rest upon the low stone bridge, where arbutus overhung the way, and where the cool moss beneath was dripping under the spray of the little river.
A cuckoo was calling through the tree-tops merrily, while the mother goats, creeping into the shade, cried to their wandering kids; and a woman, standing on a rock above us, shading her eyes from the glaring sun, beckoned to her children playing in the valley far below, shouting, "Maria! O Maria! O Santo!" in her sing-song, chant-like voice across the sultry air.
By ten o'clock we were in the carriage for Evisa, a village nearly 2800 feet above the sea level, where we were to spend the next night, and which is the best starting-point for the forests of Aïtone and Valdoniello. The ascent to the top of the Col Sevi, 1600 feet high, was long and steep, with grand views, lying through many a wild and rugged hill varied by chestnut groves, through which gleamed the everlasting snow barriers on every side.
Then through ilex woods, soft and shady, with many a sylvan glade between their gnarled, huge, moss-hugged trunks; past the village of Renno hanging overhead, and other hamlets, to more barren hills, and on to the summit of the Col, where a new range of snow mountains lay before us, glistening in the hot sun and cool puffs of sudden wind.
The descent from here into the valley of Christianiccia is singularly wild and beautiful. Our gallop down, accomplished, as it could have been, at such a pace, only by Corsican horses and a Corsican driver, was all too short to drink in the beauty of varying views, of grandest perpendicular rocks, and of graceful ilex woods interspersed with castellated boulders, overhanging the roadside. Such a gallop, however, is delightful and inspiriting over a soft, park-like road, with snow cones peeping out of a blue curtain, with aromatic odours flying by, and with beasts that never lose their footing. It is a dream of cool enjoyment that one would willingly lengthen.