ever seen the like. It is the _macchia_.

I declare that the scent of it--or rather, its thousand scents--came
wafted down on the night air and met me on the shore as I landed
at moonrise below the ruined tower, planted by the Genoese of old,
at the mouth of the vale which winds up from Porto to the mountains.
We had pushed in under cover of the darkness, for fear of cruisers: and as
I took leave of my comrades (who were mostly Neapolitan fishermen),
their skipper, a Corsican from Bastia, gave me my route. A good road
would lead me up the valley to the village of Otta, where a mule might be
hired to carry me on past Evvisa, through the great forest of Aitone, and
so across the pass over Monte Artica, whence below me I should see the
plain of the Niolo stretching towards Corte and my goal: for at Corte, his
capital, I was sure either to find Paoli or to get news of him, and if he
had gone northward to rest himself (as his custom was) at his favourite
Convent of Morosaglia, why the best road in Corsica would take me after
him.

In the wash of the waves under the old tower I bade the skipper farewell,
sprang ashore, and made my way up the valley by the light of the rising
moon. Of the wonders of the island, which had shone with such promise of
wonders against yesterday's sunset, it showed me little--only a white road
climbing beside a deepening gorge with dark masses of foliage on either
hand, and, above these, grey points and needles of granite glimmering
against the night. But at every stride I drank in the odours of the
_macchia_, my very skin seeming to absorb them, as my clothes undoubtedly
did before my journey's end; for years later I had only to open the coffer
in which they reposed, and all Corsica saluted my nostrils.

Day broke as I climbed; and soon this marvellous brushwood was holding me
at gaze for minutes at a time, my eyes feasting upon it as the sun began
to open its flowers and subdue the scents of night with others yet more
aromatic. In Spain we know _montebaxos_, or coppice shrubs (as you might
call them), and we know _tomillares_, or undergrowth; but in Corsica
nature heaps these together with both hands, and the Corsican, in despair
of separating them, calls them all _macchia_. Cistus, myrtle and cactus;
cytisus, lentisk, arbutus; daphne, heath, broom, juniper and ilex--these
few I recognised, but there was no end to their varieties and none to
their tangle of colours. The slopes flamed with