Nothing worth mentioning occurred during their journey to Swan; except the endless pleasant things of the country in summer. There were beech spinneys, wading up steep banks through their own dead leaves; fields all blurred with meadow-sweet and sorrel; brown old women screaming at their goats; acacias in full flower, and willows blown by the wind into white blossom.
From time to time, terrestrial comets—the blue flash of a kingfisher, the red whisk of a fox—would furrow and thrill the surface of the earth with beauty.
And in the distance, here and there, standing motionless and in complete silence by the flowing Dapple, were red-roofed villages—the least vain of all fair things, for they never looked at their own reflection in the water, but gazed unblinkingly at the horizon.
And there were ruined castles covered with ivy—the badge of the old order, clinging to its own; and into the ivy doves dived, seeming to leave in their wake a trail of amethyst, just as a clump of bottle-green leaves is shot with purple by the knowledge that it hides violets. And the round towers of the castles looked as if they were so firmly encrusted in the sky that, to get to their other side, one would have to hew out a passage through the celestial marble.
And the sun would set, and then our riders could watch the actual process of colour fading from the world. Was that tree still really green, or was it only that they were remembering how a few seconds ago it had been green?
And the nymph whom all travellers pursue and none has ever yet caught—the white high-road, glimmered and beckoned to them through the dusk.
All these things, however, were familiar sights to any Ludite. But on the third day (for Ranulph's sake they were taking the journey in easy stages) things began to look different—especially the trees; for instead of acacias, beeches, and willows—familiar living things for ever murmuring their secret to themselves—there were pines and liege-oaks and olives. Inanimate works of art they seemed at first and Ranulph exclaimed, "Oh, look at the funny trees! They are like the old statues of dead people in the Fields of Grammary!"
But, as well, they were like an old written tragedy. For if human, or superhuman, experience, and the tragic clash of personality can be expressed by plastic shapes, then one might half believe that these tortured trees had been bent by the wind into the spiritual shape of some old drama.
Pines and olives, however, cannot grow far away from the sea. And surely the sea lay to the east of Lud-in-the-Mist, and with each mile they were getting further away from it? It was the sea beyond the Hills of the Elfin Marches—the invisible sea of Fairyland—that caused these pines and olives to flourish.