But to these questions there can perhaps never be an answer.  Certainly the very aspect of the Marsh recalls nothing so much as the Campagna of Rome, in its nobility, loneliness and infinite subjection to the sun, the clouds, and the sky, so that at evening there we might almost think that Rome herself lay only just beyond that large horizon, and that with an effort we might reach the great gate of San Giovanni e’er darkness fell.  It is as though in the Marsh our origins for once and unmistakably were laid bare for us and we had suddenly recognised our home.

CHAPTER IX

RYE AND WINCHELSEA

Out of the vagueness and loneliness of the Marsh, with its strange level light and tingling silence, I climbed one spring evening at sunset into the ancient town of Rye, and at first I could not believe I was still in England.  No one I think can wander for more than a few days about the Marsh, among those half deserted churches, far too big for any visible congregation, whose towers in a kind of despair still stand up before God against the sea, raging and plotting far off against the land, without wondering at last into what country he has strayed.  In Rye all such doubt is resolved at once, for Rye is pure Italy, or at least it seems so in the evening dusk.  When I came up into it in the spring twilight out of the Marsh, I was reminded of one of those Italian cities which stand up over the lean shore of the Adriatic to the south of Rimini, but it was not of them I thought when in the morning sunlight I saw those red roofs piled up one upon another from the plain:  it was of Siena.  And indeed Rye is in its smaller, less complete and of course less exquisite way very like the most beautiful city in Tuscany.  Here, too, as in Siena, the red-roofed houses climb up a hill, one upon another, a hill crowned at last by a great church dedicated in honour of the Blessed Virgin.  But here the likeness, too fanciful for reality, ceases altogether.  It is true that Siena looks out beyond her own gardens and vineyards upon a desert, but it is a very different desolation upon which Rye gazes all day long, out of which she rises with all the confidence, grace, and gaiety of a flower, and over which she rules like a queen.

From the Porta Romana of Siena or the outlook of the Servi, you gaze southward across the barren, scorched valleys to the far-away mountains, to Monte Amiata, the fairest mountain of Tuscany.  From the Ypres Tower of Rye or the Gun Garden below it, you look only across the level and empty Marsh which sinks beyond Camber Castle imperceptibly into the greyness and barrenness of the sea.  To the east, across the flat emptiness, the Rother crawls seaward; to the west across the Marsh, as once across the sea, Winchelsea rises against the woods, and beyond, far away, the darkness of Fairlight hangs like a cloud twixt sea and sky.