Our Way Lies Over A
Fertile Soil, Saturated With Vital Substances - Some Paradise For
Beasts No Doubt, For They Swarm On Every Side:
Flocks of goats with a
thousand bleating kids; she-asses with their frisking young; cows and
cow-buffaloes feeding their calves; all turned loose among the crops,
to browse at their leisure, as if there were here a superabundance of
the riches of the soil.
What country is this that shows no sign of human habitation, that
knows no village, nor any distant spire? The crops are like ours at
home - wheat, lucerne, and the flowering bean that perfumes the air
with its white blossoms. But there is an excess of light in the sky
and, in the distance, an extraordinary clearness. And then these
fertile plains, that might be those of some "Promised Land," seem to
be bounded far away, on left and right, by two parallel stone walls,
two chains of rose-coloured mountains, whose aspect is obviously
desertlike. Besides, amongst the numerous animals that are familiar,
there are camels, feeding their strange nurslings that look like four-
legged ostriches. And finally some peasants appear beyond in the
cornfields; they are veiled in long black draperies. It is the East
then, an African land, or some oasis of Arabia?
The sun at this moment is hidden from us by a band of clouds, that
stretches, right above our head, from one end of the sky to the other,
like a long skein of white wool.
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