His path struck the main road presently. He wound through an enclosed valley, fairly wide. The world was all awake. The summer sun, though young in the heavens, already scorched where it fell. As he passed on, the unfailing peace of the woods received him, that deep tranquillity of verdurous gloom which absolves the wanderer from the faint glare of noon. He saw himself once more a tiny boy, and the years between shrank into a brief bewilderment in his mind. Dreaming dreams long forgotten, he rode on. A wandering sunbeam fell through the branches. For a moment everything seemed withdrawn: fret, fever, confusion not only exiled, but forgotten among the whispering leaves. The purity of a great silence was encompassing a great surrender. Behind him, straight above, the Castle of San Gemignano cut abruptly into the main curve of the sky. Below, a trifle to the south, a sister castle, beneath which a few affrighted houses closely huddled, rose against the purple mass of Monte Santa Fioré. But Francesco was looking away and out over the desolate sun-lit lands, bordered by sere brown oak woods, and gray olive hills gilded by the sun. Before him stretched the fields and oak woods and vineyards of Umbria, a wide undulating valley, enclosed by high rounded hills, bleak or dark with ilex, each with its strange terraced white city, Assisi, Spello, Spoleto and Todi. The Tiber wound lazily along their base, pale green, limpid, scarcely rippling over its yellow pebbles, screened by long rows of reeds and tall poplars, reflecting dimly the sky and trees, pointed mediaeval bridges, and crenelated round-towers. Barracks of mercenary troops, strongholds of bandit-nobles, besieged and sacked and heaped with massacre by rival factions, tangled brushwood of ilex and oak, through which wolves and foxes roamed in quest of their ghastly prey, now gave evidence of a life other than he had dreamed of even on his mountain height. Burned houses and devastated cornfields testified to the late presence here of the Wolf of Anjou. The mutilated corpses along the road offered a ghastly sight, which the scattered branches of the mulberries tried in vain to conceal from the wanderer's gaze.