Page:The Italian - Radcliffe, volume 1 (1797).djvu/241

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lines, to the walls of the monastery, which they supported. Ellena, with a dreadful pleasure, looked down them, flagged as they were with larch, and frequently darkened by lines of gigantic pine bending along the rocky ledges, till her eye rested on the thick chesnut woods that extended over their winding base, and which, softening to the plains, seemed to form a gradation between the variegated cultivation there, and the awful wildness of the rocks above. Round these extensive plains were tumbled the mountains, of various shape and attitude, which Ellena had admired on her approach to San Stefano; some shaded with forests of olive and almond trees, but the greater part abandoned to the flocks, which, in summer, feed on their aromatic herbage, and on the approach of winter, descend to the sheltered plains of the Tavogliere di Puglia'.

On the left opened the dreadful pass which she had traversed, and the thunderof

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