It served me well standing on the side of countless wet hillsides, and I wonder whether the mystical powers of tea, like the great verses of Homer, are somehow passed down through the generations.
I don't know what I'd expected of the Atlas, but it wasn't the pretty blossom-strewn villages that scattered the hillsides, the rusty-hued cubist cottages softened by haze, like something from an impressionist painting.
+33 4 6876 0903, avillelongue.free.fr First, there is eternal Provence, the hillsides scented with wild herbs: rosemary, thyme, sage, lavender.
Surveying the camp from on high, above the hillsides strung with washing lines and studded with groups of potential refugees, Emanuele Billardello, a genial taxi driver born and bred in Lampedusa, says he feels great sadness.
Hillsides are bereft of trees, leaving communities such as hers increasingly vulnerable to floods and landslides.
As the sun sets, the houses that cover the city's many hillsides change tone, chameleon-like, from strong and vibrant to dusky shades of pink, gold, sage and pale blue.
Only two hours from the Chilean capital of Santiago, Valparaíso spreads across a series of hillsides that form a natural amphitheatre overlooking the sea.
To that end, he laid Canberra out in the shape of a huge theatre of democracy, with the population in the racked seating sloping down the hillsides to an artificial lake, the government on the raised stage beyond, and the beauty of the mountains behind as an inspirational backdrop.
Foreign diplomats suggest that its counter-insurgency tactics amount to shelling the hillsides and forests from which attacks are thought to have come, and then sending in conscripts in tanks to flush out the fighters.
IT IS not much to look at: a sort of dusty, stunted poplar planted in serried ranks up Yemen's rocky hillsides.
It stands on a ridge overlooking steep hillsides at the end of a bruising dirt track, an hour by jeep from the riverside town of San Pablo, on the Magdalena in the south of Bolivar department.
