the road, the village of Oletta looks out over the plain towards St.
Florent and the sea--a few brown houses of dusky stone, with roofs of
stone; a square-towered church, built just where the cultivation ceases
and the rocks and the macquis begin.

De Vasselot quitted the road where it begins sharply to ascend, and took
the narrow path that follows the course of the river, winding through the
olive groves around the great rock that forms a shoulder of Monte Torre,
and breaks off abruptly in a sheer cliff. He looked upward with a
soldier's eye at this spot, designed by nature as the site of a fort
which could command the whole valley and the roads to Corte and Calvi.
Far above, amid chestnut trees and some giant pines, De Vasselot could
see the roof and the chimneys of a house--it was the Casa Perucca.
Presently he was so immediately below it that he could see it no longer
as he followed the path, winding as the river wound through the narrow
flat valley.

Suddenly he came out of the defile into a vast open country, spread out
like a fan upon a gentle slope rising to the height of the Col St.
Stefano, where the Bastia road comes through the Lancone defile--the road
by which Colonel Gilbert had ridden to the Casa Perucca not so very long
before. At the base of the fan runs the Aliso, without haste, bordered on
either bank by oleanders growing like rushes. Halfway down the slope is a
lump of land which looks like, and probably is, a piece of the mountain
cast off by some subterranean disturbance, and gently rolled down into
the valley. It stands alone, and on its summit, three hundred feet above
the plain, are the square-built walls of what was once a castle.

Lory stood for a moment and looked at this prospect, now pink and hazy in
the reflected light of the western sky. He knew that he was looking at