XVIII. The Little Country of the Big Mountain
After you have watched the ships of the desert sail away across the sea of sand, with Mehemet and Zaidee, you go down to a seaport town and get on a real ship. It steams for hours between yellow deserts. Then, all at once, it comes out through a canal, into the warmest, bluest big sea, dotted with the greenest islands and bordered by the greenest shores. The ship stops at many cities, everyone of them different, with different kinds of people.
In Athens the people are Greeks. Long, long ago the Greeks built the marble temple whose broken columns you may see on the hill. They wrote poetry and made up stories that we read today. They made marble statues so much more beautiful than any people have made since that we put plaster copies of them in our houses.
The Turkish city of Con-stan-ti-no-ple seems to be all round domes and tiny spires. In the shops there, you could buy the beautiful rugs the Arab chief had in his tent. Soon you come to a third city, where water streets are lined with palaces. That is Venice, in Italy. The dark, handsome young men in knee breeches, wide hats and red sashes, who stand up to row the swan-like boats, are Italians. The boats are called gon'do-las. As the Greek people of the old days made temples and statues and poetry, so the Italians built beautiful churches and palaces, and painted wonderful pictures and wrote more poetry.
You will not have time to stop in these places. Besides you will see all these people again, and all together, in the strangest place where you would never think of looking for them. There is just one place more where you really must stop awhile. It is so high up in the air that it would be nicer to go in a flying machine, although you could go in a railroad train from Venice. You can "play like" you are going in a flying machine. It's the easiest thing in the world to "play like" isn't it?
The finest place to start from is the open square in front of a fairy-tale palace, and the fairy-tale church of St. Mark's in Venice. They are all white marble arches and gold, and carved angels and flowers, and lovely spires that go away up to the clouds. Thousands of pigeons flutter about there, and nest in the hearts of the marble
