With the exception of these two structures, nothing could be more monotonous in form and color than the whole town; while nothing could be more varied than its setting.
That part of the plain outside the river, called the Cornice, had a straight edge next the river and an outer edge that showed every wildest caprice. Sometimes it ran into the mountains in bays, in curves and rivers, and sometimes the mountains crowded it to within a few feet of the river. All around rose the mountain wall, lined with hills, gentle, or abrupt; and, inundating all, a flood of verdure was thrown up on every side, like the waves of a sea. The ragged edges of the plain were heavy with wheat, rice and corn; higher up were orchards, vineyards, and terraced gardens, and a smoke of olives curling about everywhere, and groves of trees crowded into sunny hollows, and wedges of pines thrust upward, diminishing till the last tree stood alone beneath a gigantic cornice-rim of rock, snow and ice,—
“Where the olive dare not venture,
And the pine-tree’s courage fails.”
Around the middle distance of this garden-zone was a wavering path, now visible to the town, now lost, with frequent dropping paths, half stairs, to the plain. This path was called the Ring. Here and there was a glistening watercourse, or cascade; and the whole garden-circle was sparsely dotted with little cottages, some of them scarcely more than huts.
Two great masses of rock detached from the mountains were connected with them by bridges. That at the southwest was covered with a building containing a school for boys, that at the northeast had the hospital.
Directly opposite the eastern end of the avenue was the largest building in the town, called the Arcade. Here was the girls’ school, and a hotel for women.
It was here that Tacita Mora stood, in the long wide veranda that followed the whole irregular front of the building, and looked for the first time on the city of her birth. But of all this scene, splendid by daylight, in that midnight hour she saw only a bold mountain outline high against the stars, with an embroidery of shadows beneath, and lower yet, a gray bas-relief that as it approached nearer became houses.
Presently, the waning moon came up over the mountains behind the Arcade, and set a snow-peak glistening opposite, and half unveiled a ghostly sheeted avalanche, and penciled here and there a clearer outline, and showed the embossed surface of the plain cleft smoothly across from beneath the veranda where she stood to something far away that seemed like a white wavering cascade, with a fiery sparkle above it as the moon rose higher.
The desire to know more, to see nearer, to assure herself by actual touch that this was not all a twilight mirage became irresistible.