noon
This was what their hastened marriage had blessed them with , giving them leisure , before summer came , to penetrate to remote folds of the southern mountains , to linger in the shade of Sicilian orange-groves , and finally , travelling by slow stages to the Adriatic , to reach the central hill-country where even in July they might hope for a breathable air . To Ralph the Sienese air was not only breathable but intoxicating . The sun , treading the earth like a vintager , drew from it heady fragrances , crushed out of it new colours . All the values of the temperate landscape were reversed : the noon high-lights were whiter but the shadows had unimagined colour . On the blackness of cork and ilex and cypress lay the green and purple lustres , the coppery iridescences , of old bronze ; and night after night the skies were wine-blue and bubbling with stars . Ralph said to himself that no one who had not seen Italy thus prostrate beneath the sun knew what secret treasures she could yield . As he lay there , fragments of past states of emotion , fugitive felicities of thought and sensation , rose and floated on the surface of his thoughts .