So Fiona walked swiftly through the grove, not seeing one half of its beauties, though she would have loved to have lingered among the trees. For in the grove grew every tree and plant famous in legend or in history, of which not the tenth part can be told here. There was the Norse ash, whose roots bind together the framework of the earth; there the Irish hazel, of whose nuts could a man but taste he would know all knowledge and all wisdom; there the African pomegranate, but for whose sweetness the Corn-spirit would have disdained to stay beneath the earth, and the race of men would have perished. There stood Deborah's terebinth and Diotima's plane, and the Bo-tree beneath whose branches Gautama Buddha sought and found the path of Enlightenment. There grew the paper-reeds of Egypt, the repository through many centuries of a whole world's learning, the paper-reeds that grow no longer in their old home, even as the prophet Isaiah foretold; and there the clove, for whose perfumed pistils great nations had warred together and brave men died under torture. There stood the English trees, the oak and the white acacia, which had built the three-deckers for the greatest sea captain the world has seen. There was that great traveller, the mulberry, which had left its home on the Yangtse to follow the old Silk Route across Asia; which had crossed the stony Gobi, where wild camels run and the Djinn light their lamps at night to decoy travellers; which had seen the Khotan girls wading knee-deep in the Khotan River, searching for the previous white jade which should make gods for China, as erstwhile for Nineveh and Troy; which had skirted the wandering lake of Lop-nor, and had tarried awhile in old dead cities, now buried under the sands of the dreaded Taklamakan; which had seen the turquoise mines of Khorassan, and voyaged on the broad Oxus stream, till from Iran its way lay clear to the west. There grew the cedars of the Atlas, which had aided their great mountain to support the sky, and had sailed south with Hanno to the Guinea Gulf, to bring home those gorilla hides which lay on the altar of Melcarth at Carthage; and there the most famous of all the trees of the forest, the proud cedars of Lebanon, which had once exulted with their voices over the fall of the king of Assyria, which had built for Solomon his temple and his house for the daughter of Pharaoh, and which had given to the princes of Tyre the ships in which, greatly daring, they had ranged the three seas, bringing home the gold of India and the silver of Spain and the tin of Cornwall, the wealth of the east and the west, myrrh and frankincense and purple dye, ivory and apes and peacocks. And last of all was the twisted gray olive, beloved of gray-eyed Pallas Athene, the symbol of all that raises man above the savage, the tree in whose train, as it moved out from its home in Asia, had grown up all the civilizations that ringed the Mediterranean.