IN THE LANDESMay 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 uncouthpatoisthat I did not understand. And the mare, terrified, galloped forward, snorting, and swerving from side to side....
And a strange, superstitious fearcrept 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:—
“The eye is not satisfied with seeing,nor the ear with hearing.”
“The eye is not satisfied with seeing,nor the ear with hearing.”
“The eye is not satisfied with seeing,nor the ear with hearing.”
“The eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear with hearing.”