the rival city, girdled in its belt of leafy orchards; off toward the
sea, sharp, angular mountains, with outlines that from afar suggested
the fantastic castles imagined by Doré; and inland, the towns of the
upper _ribera_ floating in an emerald lake of orchard, the distant
mountains taking on a violet hue from the setting sun that was creeping
like a bristly porcupine of gold into the hot vapors of the horizon.

Behind the Hermitage all the lower _ribera_ stretched, one expanse of
rice-fields drowned under an artificial flood; then, Sueca and Cullera,
their white houses perched on those fecund lagoons like towns in
landscapes of India; then, Albufera, with its lake, a sheet of silver
glistening in the sunlight; then, Valencia, like a cloud of smoke
drifting along the base of a mountain range of hazy blue; and, at last,
in the background, the halo, as it were, of this apotheosis of light and
color, the Mediterranean--the palpitant azure Gulf bounded by the cape
of San Antonio and the peaks of Sagunto and Almenara, that jutted up
against the sky-line like the black fins of giant whales.

As Rafael looked down upon the towers of the crumbling convent of La
Murta, almost hidden in its pine-groves, he thought of all the tragedy
of the Reconquest; and almost mourned the fate of those farmer-warriors
whose white cloaks he could imagine as still floating among the groves
of those magic trees of Asia's paradise. It was the influence of the
Moor in his Spanish ancestry. Christian, clerical even, though he was,
he had inherited a melancholy, dreamy turn of mind from the very Arabs
who had created all that Eden.

He pictured to himself the tiny kingdoms of those old _walis_; vassal
districts very like the one his family ruled. But instead of resting on
influence, bribery, intimidation, and the abuse of law, they lived by