the immense sea, all in dazzling radiance under the noonday sun. A
bank of grey-blue mist lay over the South, and marked the domain where
winter was felt. Up above me stood great grey rocks, stained here and
there the colour of rose porphyry. The tops of these rocks, even here
as I look up at them from Yalta, are outlined with a bright white
line--winter and hoar-frost hold sway there also.

I have been in the sight of nut-brown hillsides, something absolutely
perfect, the warm living colour of thousands of little, closely
packed French oak trees, all withered, and holding still their little
withered leaves. The colour of these hills was the colour of Nature's
eyes.

There was silence too--such wonderful silence, one could hear one's
own heart beating. Such a morning was indeed what Richter calls a
"still-creation-day," that still silence of the heart that prefaces
new revelation, as the brooding of the dove on the waters the creation
of a world. You must know I saw the dawn, and have been with the sun
all day. I slept at a Greek coffee-house, but was up whilst the sky
was yet dark and the waves all cloudy purple. There was just one gleam
of light in the dark sky, just one little promise. The great cliffs
were all in their night cloaks, and night shapes were on the road. All
Nature was in the night world, and I felt as if I were continuing my
last night's tramping, and not starting upon a new day. Yet in the
night of my heart was also just that one gleam of whiteness in the
East, one little promise. I knew the whiteness must get more and more,
and the darkness less and less. I stood on the cliff road and watched
the waves become all alive, playing with their shadows as the light
diffused in the sky, and the white lines of the East turned to rosy
ribbons. Then the dawn twilight came and the night shapes slunk away.