receive the entire body of an infant, and not in the least like those
narrow shells in our churches in which you can only dip your fingers.
With its clear water rendered more limpid by the contrast of a greenish
bed, the vegetation which has grown all around it during the religious
calm of centuries, its crumbling angles, and its great mass of bronzed
stone, it looks like one of those hollowed rocks which contain salt
water.

After we had inspected the chapel carefully, we walked to the river,
crossed it in a boat, and plunged into the country.

It is absolutely deserted and strangely empty. Trees, bushes, sea-rushes,
tamarisks, and heather grow on the edge of the ditches. We came to broad
stretches of land, but we did not see a soul anywhere. The sky was bleak
and a fine rain moistened the atmosphere and spread a grey veil over the
country. The paths we chose were hollow and shaded by clusters of
foliage, the branches of which, uniting, drooped over our heads and
almost prevented us from walking erect. The light that filtered through
the dome of leaves was greenish, and as dim as on a winter evening. But
farther away, it was brilliant, and played around the edges of the leaves
and accentuated their delicate pinking. Later we reached the top of a
barren slope, which was flat and smooth, and without a blade of grass to
relieve the monotony of its colour. Sometimes, however, we came upon a
long avenue of beech-trees with moss growing around the foot of their
thick, shining trunks. There were wagon-tracks in these avenues, as if
to indicate the presence of a neighbouring castle that we might see at
any moment; but they ended abruptly in a stretch of flat land that
continued between two valleys, through which it would spread its green
maze furrowed by the capricious meanderings of hedges, spotted here and
there by a grove, brightened by clumps of sea-rushes, or by some field
bordering the meadows which rose slowly to meet the hills and lost
themselves in the horizon. Above these hills, far away in the mist,
stretched the blue surface of the ocean.

The birds are either absent or they do not sing; the leaves are thick,
the grass deadens one's footfalls, and the country gazes at you like
some melancholy countenance. It looks as if it had been created
expressly to harbour ruined lives and shattered hopes, and to foster
their bitterness beneath its weeping sky, to the low rustling of the
trees and the heather. On winter nig