To the left, deep down within the hills, lay the little harbour of San Remo, with its rugged stone pier and its shabby old houses, and the old, old town climbing up the steep ascent to that isolated point where the white dome of the Sanctuary shone out against the milky azure of the noontide sky; and further and further away stretched the long line of the olive-clothed hills, to the purple distance, where the seamen’s church of Madonna della Guardia stands boldly out between sky and sea, as if it were a half-way house on the road to heaven. “How lovely it all is!” cried Allegra. “But don’t you feel that one careless step upon that flowery edge yonder would send us whirling down the cliffs to awful, inevitable death? When that man passed us just now with his loaded cart, I felt sick with fear--the wheels seemed to graze the brink of the abyss as the horse crept slowly along--poor stolid brute!--unconscious of his danger. It is a dreadful drive, Isola, this zig-zag road to Colla--slant above slant, backwards and forwards, up the face of this prodigious cliff. I had to shut my eyes at every turn of the road, when the world below seemed to swim in a chaos of light and colour--so beautiful, so terrible! Do you see the height of those cliffs, terrace above terrace, hill above hill? Why, that level road at the very bottom is the top of a taller cliff than those I used to think so appalling at Broadstairs and Ramsgate!” “I don’t think it would make much difference to a man who fell over the edge whether he fell here or in the Isle of Thanet,” said Martin Disney, as he stood, with his arm drawn through his wife’s, sweeping the prospect with his field glass. “Oh, but it would! One would be only a sudden shock and a plunge into the sea, or swift annihilation on the rocks below; but from this awful height--think of the horror of it! To go whirling down, plucked at here by an olive branch, or there by a jagged rock, yet always whirling downward, rebounding from edge to edge, faster, and faster, and faster, till one were dashed into a shapeless mass on that white road yonder!” “And to think of people living up there in the clouds, and going to sleep every night with the knowledge of this mighty wall and that dreadful abyss in their minds!” she concluded, pointing upward to where the little white town of Colla straggled along the edge of the hill.