By The
Time I Reached It The Dawn Began To Occupy The East.
For a long time I stood in a favoured place, just above a bank of
trees that lined the river, and watched the beginning of the day,
because every slow increase of light promised me sustenance.
The faint, uncertain glimmer that seemed not so much to shine through
the air as to be part of it, took all colour out of the woods and
fields and the high slopes above me, leaving them planes of grey and
deeper grey. The woods near me were a silhouette, black and
motionless, emphasizing the east beyond. The river was white and
dead, not even a steam rose from it, but out of the further pastures a
gentle mist had lifted up and lay all even along the flanks of the
hills, so that they rose out of it, indistinct at their bases,
clear-cut above against the brightening sky; and the farther they were
the more their mouldings showed in the early light, and the most
distant edges of all caught the morning.
At this wonderful sight I gazed for quite half-an-hour without moving,
and took in vigour from it as a man takes in food and wine. When I
stirred and looked about me it had become easy to see the separate
grasses; a bird or two had begun little interrupted chirrups in the
bushes, a day-breeze broke from up the valley ruffling the silence,
the moon was dead against the sky, and the stars had disappeared. In a
solemn mood I regained the road and turned my face towards the
neighbouring sources of the river.
I easily perceived with each laborious mile that I was approaching the
end of my companionship with the Moselle, which had become part of my
adventure for the last eighty miles. It was now a small stream,
mountainous and uncertain, though in parts still placid and slow.
There appeared also that which I take to be an infallible
accompaniment of secluded glens and of the head waters of rivers
(however canalized or even overbuilt they are), I mean a certain
roughness all about them and the stout protest of the hill-men: their
stone cottages and their lonely paths off the road.
So it was here. The hills had grown much higher and come closer to the
river-plain; up the gullies I would catch now and then an aged and
uncouth bridge with a hut near it all built of enduring stone: part of
the hills. Then again there were present here and there on the spurs
lonely chapels, and these in Catholic countries are a mark of the
mountains and of the end of the riches of a valley. Why this should be
so I cannot tell. You find them also sometimes in forests, but
especially in the lesser inlets of the sea-coast, and, as I have said,
here in the upper parts of valleys in the great hills.
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