196 THE BAMBOO GARDEN CHAP. 
me to know that every tiny rill that whispered over the 
great moss-grown stones, glimmering through a carpet of 
daintiest wild flowers, would fight its way down to join the 
rushing Scamander in the plain, just as it had done in the 
days of the ten years’ siege. It was my first taste of the 
East. The sunshine was brighter, the shadows were darker 
than any that I had seen before, and over dell and glade and 
rockbound burn there was a glamour of sensuous beauty, 
new, strange, and bewildering. Nor was there room to 
doubt that Homer himself must have travelled through the 
mountain forests that he described. For as we went 
upward, the vegetation, so luxuriant below, became scantier 
and scantier until it dwindled into mere scrub, and finally 
ceased altogether; then came a stiff climb across loose 
shingle, where hardly a lichen was to be found, and over 
which we had painfully to drag our unwilling horses until 
we reached the summit. There, wonder of wonders! after 
the long and weary tramp over barren rock, there burst 
upon our view the very carpet of flowers which marked the 
spot where the Lady Hera, having borrowed the girdle of the 
Goddess of Love, decoyed the cloud-compelling Zeus. 
Old Homer must have seen this strange sight, and invented 
the pretty fable to account for it. He could not have been 
born blind. 
Ah! Mother Ida! many-fountained Ida! “your beauty 
177 
haunts me like a fever dream Crags and fells, groves 
and streams, all are visions of supreme loveliness. It is the 
gardening of the gods, inimitable, unapproachable, and yet 
conveying a great lesson. Happily for the world, though 
there are few scenes to match those which inspired the old 
