IN THE LANDES
May 27
Since sunrise I had been travelling—along the straight-stretching roads, white with summer sand, interminably striped by the shadows of the poplars; across the great, parched plain, where, all the day’s length, the heat dances over the waste land, and the cattle bells float their far-away tinkling; through the desolate villages, empty but for the beldames, hunched in the doorways, pulling the flax with horny, tremulous fingers; and on towards the desolate silence of the flowerless pine-forests....
And there the night fell. The sun went down unseen; a dim flickering ruddled the host of tree trunks; and the darkness started to drift through the forest. The road grew narrow as a footpath, and the mare slackening her pace, uneasily strained her white neck ahead.
Out of the darkness a figure sprang beside me. A shout rang out—words of an uncouth patois that I did not understand. And the mare, terrified, galloped forward, snorting, and swerving from side to side....
And a strange, superstitious fear crept over me—a dreamy dread of the future; a helpless presentiment of evil days to come; a sense, too, of the ruthless nullity of life, of the futile deception of effort, of bitter revolt against the extinction of death, a yearning after faith in a vague survival beyond....
And the words of the old proverb returned to me mockingly:—