The Seven Streams by Warwick Deeping

All that day and the next Tristan and the Duchess rode south from St. Geneviève's shrine, through the woods and meadows, rich with the magic of many flowers. The tall grass seemed as a rare robe shot through with threads of diverse colours. In the woods the ilex and the beech lifted their broad domes towards the blue, and in the pastures a myriad aspens shivered in the breeze.

Towards the noon of the second day the lowlands stretched back towards the north. Tristan and his men came to a wilder region, where the woods grew dark beneath the shadows of the mountains. Through a multitude of poplars whistling in the wind, amid fields spread with poppies, yellow and red, the road curled through dense thickets of chestnut and of beech. Higher still, under the deepening darkness of the trees, the road dwindled to a grass-grown track, so that the armed men rode in single file, a silvery snake that wavered through the green. Higher still, the spruce and larch fretted the blue dome of the sky, and heavenwards towered the silver firs and great pines, sombre and huge of girth.