[Gutenberg 39970] • The Hill of Venus

Excerpt from The Hill of Venus

Out of the green dusk of forest aisles in which lost sun beams quivered, there rode a horseman into the shadowy si lence of the deepening twilight.

Horse and rider alike seemed to feel the sway of the hour. Their appearance did not so much as startle a bird, which from the boughs of a carob-tree was languidly carolling a slumber song, that melted away in the purple twilight without a single vibration. Rider and steed drooped; the one in his saddle, the other over the fragrant grass, into which the tired hoofs sank at every step.

The solitary traveller seemed lost in contemplation of the scenery, as he now and then paused in the shadow of the dwarfed plane and carob-trees. Round their grotesquely gnarled trunks vines clung in fantastic tapestries of living green, between which the path seemed to wind towards strange twilight worlds. Slowly, as if under the weight of some heavy spell, the horseman continued upon the deserted road, when he was suddenly roused from his abstracted reveries by the sound of the Angelus, cleaving the stillness with echoing chimes.