Traù

“Among tall shafts of aloes the spires and towers of Trau appear, and we leave our carriage at its gate. Trau is not clean; in fact, it is the only dirty town we found in Dalmatia. The streets are dark and dismal and a ray of sunlight scarce ever touches their grimy pavement. One hesitates to enter the dingy lanes, where slatternly women perform their toilet by the open door or wash their dirty linen in vats of suds: where coopers thump resounding barrels and donkeys bear their evil-smelling loads. Bacchus has been here, too. The purplish pavements reek with drippings - from every house exhales the odor of fermenting wine.

But the Piazza is well kept, and on the west front of the Cathedral we are repaid by seeing the finest portal in Dalmatia - and fine enough it is for any place. To the right of the door a primitive Adam, to the left an equally primitive Eve, stand upon snarling lions, crushing evil monsters. Myriad figures people the arches, and on the friezes and pilasters peacocks strut and strange beasts disport themselves and children play with birds of paradise.

As we journey homeward in the twilight hours the morning’s panorama rolls back again, but softened and chastened by the evening light. Asses almost hidden under loads of grass, tired children sleeping in the plodding carts, misty tree-forms, cavalcades of Slavs, huge men with turbaned heads astride of fleet-foot ponies, file in procession across the sapphire sky - a strange kaleidoscope of misty forms, half real, like phantoms not living, yet not dead. A break in the gathering clouds and a last pink ray of daylight flushes with coral the towering mountain-tops - then darkness and the twinkling stars” (pp. 88-90).