he countries!

No one, one feels, ever landed (since AEneas and his companions) upon
this shallow strand, save the raiding Saracens and Barbary pirates,
against whom the castle, the martello tower, barely more of Palo, was
built. For there is not even here what represents the life of the
Mediterranean, the jutting rocks, the sucking in of sea, by the
cliffs, the sudden squalls of the stony coasts where sea and land
really play and fight together, waves leaping tower-high, and
battering at hillsides and swirling in and out of creeks. Here, one
understands that a storm would mean mere passive submerging: the water
rising higher, covering the straight narrow beach, the low green
fields, noiselessly, and retreating when so inclined, with neat stacks
of seaweed and samphire left behind. The renovation of Rome, like its
drinking water, has always come from the mountains; the Tiber mouth is
their outlet, not the inlet of the sea. And the mountain clouds change
in shape, stagnate and brood in this low trough; the mountain air
faints, dies, in these fever levels.

The beach of Palo is only a few yards wide: a low natural wall of
corroded tufo, covered with no maritime bent, but ordinary grass; a
line of sea refuse, a band of fine black sparkling sand, and little
waves fringed black with that mournful sand, breaking feebly against
it. A high sky, with a few sailing clouds; and in it, rather than on
the sea, some boats, like toy ducks, on the offing, motionless. We sat
on the sand, digging into its moist warmth, and amused (I at least)
that this glittering beach left no trace on the land; making Carpaccio
St. George Dragons (with inserted eyes of sand flint) out of blistered
drift-wood; and looking about, later, for bits of antique marble and
brick upon the sands. For this lazy sea appears to wash no pebbles of
its own bringing, but only fragments of stone brought by man, broken
off man's buildings, shot by him into the Tiber, in the days, no
doubt, when columns were sawed into discs and smashed into
petal-shaped wedges for the _Opus Alexandrinum_. I don't think we saw
one natural looking stone upon that beach; everything seemed vaguely,
precious and outlandish, basalt, porphyry, agate, Rossoantique, and
serpentine still bearing its original polish; also fine white marble,
Mme. B. possessing a beautiful piece of salty Parian found there, and
shaped delicately, curved and bossy, into a perfect heart, the heart
of a marble Artemis