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We sailed up the Timavo. The wind had freshened, and I must confess it was really rather pleasant. Wild ducks rose from the reeds with a great splashing and flapping of wings, and occasionally a snipe would dart away with its peculiar twisting zigzag flight and harsh cry. At San Giovanni we landed, and walked home. Our path, for part of the way, lay along an old Roman road, and then we passed through a little wood of stunted trees (the last remnant of the "boundless forests" of old times), which in autumn is one pink carpet of heavily-scented cyclamens. We skirted the deer park, where some twenty or thirty fallow deer lead a cheerless existence and are fed on hay all the year round. The ground in the park is covered with stones, not a blade of grass is to be seen, only the hardy ilex seems able to flourish on the barren soil.
It has a curious appearance, this little tract of country round Duino, with its dull gray rocks. A few bushes manage to extract enough nourishment from somewhere to exist, but every cranny and crevice in the stones is gay and bright with wild flowers.
Monotonous and almost melancholy is the scenery, and yet it has a charm of its own; the sun shines so brightly, the sky is so blue; and then there is always the sea, ever changeful and ever beautiful, and the old gray castle in the distance, towering above all, and watching over the silent land.
CHAPTER V
A RAINY DAY
The rain came down upon my head
Unsheltered, and the heavy wind
Rendered me mad, and deaf, and blind.
E. A. Poe.