Page:Path of Vision; pocket essays of East and West.djvu/116

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

THE PATH OF VISION

write the calendar there is the deepest mutual sympathy and respect.

The seasons come and go, but the mark of their footsteps on my native horizon are ineffaceable. Here Time has erected eternal monuments to his departing children. In Mt. Sanneen, rising in the East over a dozen peaks slurred together, we behold Winter shrouded in snow; in the tiger-spotted escarpments, in the grey cliffs, barren and amorphous, forming a huge wall to the deep gorge in which the river flows, we have a fitting monument to Autumn; while in the lowlands facing the Mediterranean, the orange orchards and the olive groves are beautiful monuments to Summer and Spring, wrapped in the light green of the fields and buried in the warm brown soil of life perennial. Indeed, my native horizon is a cyclorama of all the seasons. And the sun rising in Summer over the snow-covered tomb of Winter, from behind the serrate and spotted peaks of Mt. Sanneen, presents a deeply suggestive contrast. It makes me think of the snow

[112]