aned, if my eyes could discern no interval, my mind preserved the
impression of an abyss.

From a long way off one could distinguish and identify the steeple of
Saint-Hilaire inscribing its unforgettable form upon a horizon beneath
which Combray had not yet appeared; when from the train which brought
us down from Paris at Easter-time my father caught sight of it, as it
slipped into every fold of the sky in turn, its little iron cock veering
continually in all directions, he would say: "Come, get your wraps
together, we are there." And on one of the longest walks we ever took
from Combray there was a spot where the narrow road emerged suddenly
on to an immense plain, closed at the horizon by strips of forest over
which rose and stood alone the fine point of Saint-Hilaire's steeple,
but so sharpened and so pink that it seemed to be no more than sketched
on the sky by the finger-nail of a painter anxious to give to such a
landscape, to so pure a piece of 'nature,' this little sign of art, this
single indication of human existence. As one drew near it and could make
out the remains of the square tower, half in ruins, which still stood by
its side, though without rivalling it in height, one was struck, first
of all, by the tone, reddish and sombre, of its stones; and on a misty
morning in autumn one would have called it, to see it rising above the
violet thunder-cloud of the vineyards, a ruin of purple, almost the
colour of the wild vine.

Often in the Square, as we came home, my grandmother would make me stop
to look up at it. From the tower windows, placed two and two, one pair
above another, with that right and original proportion in their spacing
to which not only human faces owe their beauty and dignity, it released,
it let fall at regular intervals flights of jackdaws which for a little
while would wheel and caw, as though the ancient stones which allowed
them to sport thus and never seemed to see them, becoming of a sudden
uninhabitable and discharging some infinitely disturbing element, had
struck them and driven them forth. Then after patterning everywhere the
violet velvet of the evening air, abruptly soothed, they would return
and be absorbed in the tower, deadly no longer but benignant, some
perching here and there (not seeming to move, but snapping, perhaps, and
swallowing some passing insect) on the points of turrets, as a seagull
perches, with an angler's immobility, on the crest of a wave. Without
quite know