It is an immense, dark, cold place. Tall lemon trees, heavy
with half-visible fruit, crowd together, and rise in the gloom. They
look like ghosts in the darkness of the underworld, stately, and as if
in life, but only grand shadows of themselves. And lurking here and
there, I see one of the pillars, But he, too, seems a shadow, not one of
the dazzling white fellows I knew. Here we are trees, men, pillars, the
dark earth, the sad black paths, shut in in this enormous box. It is
true, there are long strips of window and slots of space, so that the
front is striped, and an occasional beam of light fingers the leaves of
an enclosed tree and the sickly round lemons. But it is nevertheless
very gloomy.
'But it is much colder in here than outside,' I said.
'Yes,' replied the Signore, 'now. But at night--I _think_--'
I almost wished it were night to try. I wanted to imagine the trees
cosy. They seemed now in the underworld. Between the lemon trees, beside
the path, were little orange trees, and dozens of oranges hanging like
hot coals in the twilight. When I warm my hands at them the Signore
breaks me off one twig after another, till I have a bunch of burning
oranges among dark leaves, a heavy bouquet.
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