if they remained from some great race that had once worshipped here. And
still, in the winter, some are seen, standing away in lonely places
where the sun streams full, grey rows of pillars rising out of a broken
wall, tier above tier, naked to the sky, forsaken.

They are the lemon plantations, and the pillars are to support the heavy
branches of the trees, but finally to act as scaffolding of the great
wooden houses that stand blind and ugly, covering the lemon trees in
the winter.

In November, when cold winds came down and snow had fallen on the
mountains, from out of the storehouses the men were carrying timber, and
we heard the clang of falling planks. Then, as we walked along the
military road on the mountain-side, we saw below, on the top of the
lemon gardens, long, thin poles laid from pillar to pillar, and we heard
the two men talking and singing as they walked across perilously,
placing the poles. In their clumsy zoccoli they strode easily across,
though they had twenty or thirty feet to fall if they slipped. But the
mountain-side, rising steeply, seemed near, and above their heads the
rocks glowed high into the sky, so that the sense of elevation must have
been taken away. At any rate, they went easily from pillar-summit to
pillar-summit, with a great cave of space below. Then again was the
rattle and clang of planks being laid in order, ringing from the
mountain-side over the blue lake, till a platform of timber, old and
brown, projected from the mountain-side, a floor when seen from above, a
hanging roof when seen from below. And we, on the road above, saw the
men sitting easily on this flimsy hanging platform, hammering the
planks. And all day long the sound of hammering echoed among the rocks
and olive woods, and came, a faint, quick concussion, to the men on the
boats far out. When the roofs were on they put in the fronts, blocked in