ose
summit there is the cedar forest of Teniet-el-Haad.

On that day I lost my way. I had just climbed to the top of a hill,
whence, beyond a long extent of rising ground, I had seen the extensive
plain of Metidja, and then, on the summit of another chain, almost
invisible in the distances that strange monument which is called _The
Tomb of the Christian Woman_, and which was said to be the burial-place
of the kings of Mauritana. I went down again, going southward, with a
yellow landscape before me, extending as far as the fringe of the desert,
as yellow as if all those hills were covered with lions' skins sewn
together, sometimes a pointed yellow peak would rise out of the midst of
them, like the bristly back of a camel.

I walked quickly and lightly, like as one does when following tortuous
paths on a mountain slope. Nothing seems to weigh on one in those short,
quick walks through the invigorating air of those heights, neither the
body, nor the heart, nor the thoughts, nor even cares. On that day I
felt nothing of all that crushes and tortures our life; I only felt the
pleasure of that descent. In the distance I saw an Arab encampment, brown
pointed tents, which seemed fixed to the earth, like limpets are to a
rock, or else _gourbis_, huts made of branches, from which a gray smoke
rose. White figures, men and women, were walking slowly about, and the
bells of the flocks sounded vaguely through the evening air.

The arbutus trees on my road hung down under the weight of their purple
fruit, which was falling on the ground. They looked like martyred trees,
from which blood-colored sweat was falling, for at the top of every tier
there was a red spot, like a drop of blood.

The earth all round them was covered with it, and as my feet crushed the
fruit, they left blood-colored traces behind them, and sometimes, as I
went along, I would jump and pick one, and eat it.

All the valleys were by this time filled with a white vapor, which rose
slowly, like the steam from the flanks of an ox, and on the chain of
mountains that bordered the horizon, on the outskirts of the desert of
Sahara, the sky was in flames. Long streaks of gold alternated with
streaks of blood--blood again! Blood and gold, the whole of human
history--and sometimes between the two there was a small opening in
the greenish azure, far away like a dream.

How far away I was from all those persons and things with which one
occupies oneself on the boulevards,