A blazingly limpid landscape on the island of Thera, plunging down to the sea, with flashes of passing birds and lizards over patterned stones and anchored plants. 

But there is a delicate order, too, imposed by tracery of asphodel and grape-hyacinth, purple mallow and coppery dandelion, by root of wild fig and branch of wild olive; in the prostrate stones of that scheme the static pattern of lichen abides, the fleeting pattern of the hawk’s wing goes in a flash, lizard twinkles, butterfly hovers, a coney is seen and gone; where hot blue sky is overhead, and on all sides the mountain thrusts down to the hare-bell sea.  

Source: Louis Golding, Good-bye to Ithaca (London: Hutchinson, 1955), p. 125

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