Page:Claire Ambler (1928).djvu/93

 both left and right, from this ledge above the precipice, her eye commanded vast sweeps of surf-edged coast, haunted in every cove and ravine with antique tragedy. Before her, across the straits that led to Scylla and Charybdis, there shimmered in the haze of distance, like a mountain landscape in a dream, the high, blue-cleft shores of old Calabria; and below her—far, far below the garden—the sea was stained to that brilliancy of turquoise colour Claire found unbelievable even when she looked at it.

Overhead, behind the monastery and the town of Raona, there were other incredibilities. Against the sky rose peak and crag and pinnacle of rock, whereon, "like the lead at the point of a pencil," she thought, were ancient little walled towns and the broken towers of stone Saracen and Norman castles. Necromancy must have got them there, it seemed; for human energy, even in medieval passions of fear, would have been too feeble—though, of all the magic about her, what she thought most necromantic in beauty was the Greek theatre that crowned the skyward lift at the end of the long cliff of Raona.

She had been there, the night before, in the moonlight with Arturo Liana; but the thrill of the romantic she felt then, as now, was not caused by Arturo,