From this point a new feature of beauty was added to the landscape: fountains rose on all sides, the overflowing of whose basins had frequently worn a deep channel across the road, where the waters rushed glittering and brawling along. With the form of one of these fountains I was particularly struck; it was evidently of considerable antiquity, and was overshadowed by a majestic lime-tree, whose long branches stretched far across the road; but its source was dried, and it was rapidly falling to decay.
I hesitated for an instant whether I should sketch the fountain, or again lend to it for an instant the voice that it had lost. I decided on the latter alternative—and, seating myself upon the edge of the basin, I hastily scratched the following stanzas in my note-book.
The emblem of a heart o’er-tried, I stand amid the waste; My sparkling source has long been dried; And the worn pilgrim, to whose ear My gushing stream was once so dear, Passes me by in haste.
No wild bird dips its weary wing In my pure waters now; No blushing flowers in beauty spring, Fed by the gentle dews, that erst Taught each fair blossom how to burst With a yet brighter glow.
The nightingale responds no more Since my glad sound was hushed, As she was wont to do of yore, To the continuous flow, which oft, When leaves were rife, and winds were soft, Like her own music gushed.
Still wave the lime-boughs, whose sweet shade Was o’er my waters cast, When high in Heaven the sunbeams played; But o’er my dried-up basin now Vainly is spread each leafy bough; It but recalls the past—
And thus the human heart no less, In its young ardent years, Pours forth its gushing tenderness Freely, as though time could not fling A gloom around each lovely thing, And turn its smiles to tears.
And thus, like me, it too must prove How soon the spell goes by; How falsehood follows fast on love, Treachery on trust, and guile on truth; Until the heart, so full in youth, In age is waste and dry.
Worn heart, and dried-up fount—for ye The world is fair in vain; Birds sing, boughs wave, and winds are free; But song, nor shade, nor breath, can more Your joyful gush of life restore— It will not flow again!
A great stretch of road, after we had passed the exhausted fountain, traversed another of those immense plains for which this part of the country is celebrated. No monotony, however, renders them irksome to the traveller; on the contrary, they are characteristic and various in the extreme. Gigantic walnut trees, laden with fruit; fig trees, almost bending beneath their own produce; little wildernesses of gum cistus, carpeting the earth with their petals; woods of mulberry trees; stretches of dwarf oak, with here and there timber of larger size overtopping them; grass land, gay with tents, pitched for the accommodation of those who guard the droves of horses grazing in their vicinity; camels browzing on the young shoots of the forest trees; herds of buffaloes, with their flat and crescent-shaped horns folding backward, and their coarse and scantily-covered hides caked with the mud in which they have been wallowing; and flocks of goats as wild and as agile as the chamois, keep the eye and the imagination alike employed.