in parts by the Zanthos.
The capital, Vaza, was flooded. In the neighbourhood of the
mountain-slopes the province had been spared. There vast terraces of
vineyards lay, alternating with forests of chestnut-trees and
walnut-trees and olives. The glittering white snow-line of the
mountain-tops surged up against a dazzling blue sky, piercing it with
its crests and biting long pieces out of the deep azure in ragged lines;
it seemed to whet ice-teeth, gleaming white fangs, against the metal of
the firmament, which was like burnished steel. There, enthroned on its
rocks, twelve miles from the town, stood old Castel Vaza, the castle of
the dukes of Yemena and counts of Vaza, surrounded by parks and woods,
half castle, half citadel, strong, simple, medieval, rough in outline,
with its four towers and its square patches of battlements, rounding off
the horizon about it on every side and keeping it aloof. Near at hand, a
swarm of little villages; in the distance, the towers and steeples, the
huddled roofs of Vaza; still farther, in the circle of panorama that
broadly girt the towers, the wide Zanthos, winding down to hurl itself
into the sea, and Lycilia, white in the sun with its little squares of
houses, set brilliantly on the blue of the water; then a second sea: the
mountain-tops, surging away in snowy vistas and distant mists. And, also
glittering in the sun, those strange lakes on the Zanthos: the water
which the full river had vomited, the inundations....

* * * * *

The square castle, enclosing a courtyard in its four wings, has two more
wings added at the back, in a newer style of more elegant renascence,
and looking on the park, in which lie the ornamental basins, like oval
dishes of liquid silver, set in emerald lawns. The fallow deer graze
there, dreaming, as it were, and graceful, roaming slowly on slim legs:
sometimes, suddenly, extending themselves, their heads thrown back,
their eyes wild, they run some distance, a number of them, fleeing
before an unseen terror; others, calmer, graze on, laconically,
philosophically.

The dukes of Yemena and counts of Vaza are one of the oldest families of
the empire; and their ancestral tree is rooted ages back, before the
time of the first emperor of Liparia. The present duke, court-marshal
and Constable of Liparia, has three children of his first marriage: the
heir to his title, the young Marquis of Xardi, aide-de-camp to the
emperor, and two