village, or rather of a small town of historic antiquity, grown rusty with too much sunshine, the houses crowded closely together and connected by dark archways, a network of covered lanes which climb the sheer cliff with snatches of light from above, openings like the mouths of mines affording glimpses of broods of children with curly hair like a halo about their heads, baskets of luscious fruit, a woman descending the rough pavements with a pitcher on her head or a distaff in her hand. Then, at a corner of the street, the blue twinkling of the waves, immensity once more. But as the day wore on, the sun, mounting higher in the heavens, scattered its beams over the sea just emerging from its mists, heavy with sleep, dazed, motionless, with a quartz-like transparence, and myriads of rays fell upon the water as if arrow-points had pricked it, making a dazzling reflection, doubled in intensity by the whiteness of the cliffs and the soil, by a veritable African sirocco which raised the dust in a spiral column as the carriage passed. They reached the hottest, the most sheltered portions of the Corniche,--a genuinely tropical temperature, where dates, cactus, the aloe, with its tall, candelabra-like branches, grow in the fields. When he saw those slender trunks, that fantastic vegetation shooting up in the white, hot air, when he felt the blinding dust crunching under the wheels like snow, de Gery, his eyes partly closed, half-dreaming in that leaden noonday heat, fancied that he was making once more the tiresome journey from Tunis to the Bardo, which he had made so often in a strange medley of Levantine chariots, brilliant liveries, _meahris_ with long neck and hanging lip, gayly-caparisoned mules, young asses, Arabs in rags, half-naked negroes, great functionaries in full dress, with their escorts of honor. Should he find yonder, where the road skirts gardens of palm-trees, the curious, colossal architecture of the bey's palace, its close-meshed window gratings, its marble doors, its _moucharabies_ cut out of wood and painted in vivid colors? It was not the Bardo, but the pretty village of Bordighera, divided like all those on the coast into two parts, the _Marine_ lying along the shore, and the upper town, connected by a forest of statuesque palms with slender stalks and drooping tops,--veritable rockets of verdure, showing stripes of blue through their innumerable regular clefts.