waves were smoothed, you now see only a laughing expanse;
spun out over this polished back a thousand greenish tresses sported
wantonly; the light rested on it, like a diaphanous mantle; it
followed the supple movements and the twisting of those liquid arms;
it folded around them, behind them, its radiant, azure robe; it took
their caprices and their mobile colors; the river meanwhile, slumbrous
in its great, peaceful bed, was stretched out at the feet of the
hills, which looked down upon it, like it immovable and eternal.

The boat is made fast to a boom, under a pile of white houses; it
is Royan. Here already are the sea and the dunes; the right of the
village is buried under a mass of sand; there are crumbling hills,
little dreary valleys, where you are lost as if in the desert; no
sound, no movement, no life; scanty, leafless vegetation dots moving
soil, and its filaments fall like sickly hairs; small shells, white
and empty, cling to these in chaplets, and, wherever the foot is set,
they crack with a sound like a cricket's chirp; this place is the
ossuary of some wretched maritime tribe.

One tree alone can live here, the pine, a wild creature, inhabitant of
the forests and sterile coasts; there is a whole colony of them here;
they crowd together fraternally, and cover the sand with their brown
lamels; the monotonous breeze which sifts through them forever awakes
their murmur; thus they chant in a plaintive fashion, but with a far
softer and more harmonious voice than the other trees; this voice
resembles the grating of the cicadas when in August they sing with all
their heart among the stalks of the ripened wheat.

At the left of the village, a footpath winds to the summit of a wasted
bank, among billows of standing grasses. The river is so broad that
the other shore is not distinguishable. The sea, its neighbor, imparts
its influence; its long undulations come one after another against the
coast, and pour their little cascades of foam upon the sand; then the
water retires, running down the slope until it meets a new wave coming
up which covers it; these billows are never wearied, and their come
and go remind one of the regular breathing of a slumbering child. For
night has fallen, the tints of purple grow brown and fade away. The
river goes to rest in the soft, vague shadow; scarcely, at long
intervals, a remnant glimpse is reflected from a slanting wave;
obscurity drowns everything in its vapory dust; the dro