CHAPTER LXXIV.
Those Thursdays at Limoise when the fierce heat of the noon-day sun
overwhelmed everything, and the country side lay asleep and silent
under its pitiless rays, it was my habit to clamber up to the top of
the old wall that enclosed the garden, and there I sat astride and
immovable for a long time. The branching ivy reached to my shoulders
and innumerable flies and locusts buzzed around me. From the height of
this observatory I had a view of the hot and lonely region lying
beyond, of the moorland and woodland, and from there I saw a thin
white veil of mist that was agitated ceaselessly by the waves of heat,
as the surface of a tiny lake is ruffled by the least wind. Those
horizons seen from Limoise still had for me the strange mystery I had
endowed them with in the first summers of my life. The region visible
from the top of the wall was a rather solitary one, and I tried to
make myself believe that the waste land and woodland was a veritable
untrodden country that stretched out indefinitely; and although I now
knew well that about me everywhere there were roads; cultivated
fields, and prosperous villages, I succeeded in clinging to the
illusion that the surrounding country and contiguous lands were wild
and primitive.
And the better to deceive myself I took care to shut out, by looking
through my fingers folded together spy-glass fashion, all that would
have spoiled for me the impression of loneliness; an old farm house,
for instance, with its bit of cultivated vineyard and smooth road.
And there all alone, in that silence murmurous with the buzzing of
many insects, distracted by nothing, always turning my hollowed hand
towards the most desolate portion of the landscape, I succeeded in
gaining an impression of distant, tropical countries.
I had impressions of Brazil particularly, but I do not know why in
those moments of contemplation the neighboring forest always suggested
that country to me.
In passing I must describe this forest, the first one of all the
earth's forests that I knew, and the one I loved the best: the
straight, slim trunks of the ancient evergreen oaks, of sombre
foliage, were like the columns of a church; not a particle of brush
grew under them, but the dry soil was covered all the year with the
most exquisite short grass, soft and fine as down, and here and there
grew furze, dropwort and other rare flowers that thrive in the shade.
