Page:Claire Ambler (1928).djvu/71



T RAONA, that ancient Mediterranean town on a cliff ledge halfway to the sky, there is one of those romantic hotels that once were monasteries. The pedestrian comes to it by flights of stone steps leading down from sixteenth-century streets; he enters a cloister where there are oleander trees and an old pink-and-white-marble fountain; then he crosses a groined corridor with a pavement of red tiles worn uneven by centuries of monkish treading, and walks out into a sunny garden on the top of a precipice. The garden is murmurous with bees, with the faint swishing of the slow, turquoise sea a thousand feet below, and sometimes, perhaps, with a quiet English voice reading the Odyssey to an invalid drowsing in the tremulous shade of feathered palm trees. Nothing could be more appropriate than such a reading, moreover; for the sea, so far below, is the very water traversed by Odysseus as he sailed nearer to Scylla and Charybdis; and Mr. Eugene Rennie, an American villa-dweller in Raona, coming