Note the curious illusion produced on the piazza of
St Peter's by the interior measurements of the trapezium, which are so
many years and so many yards, ...' &c., and so forth ... exactly like
a mill.
I meanwhile sat on still silent, still drinking beer and watching the
Phocean; gradually suffering the fascination that had captured the
villagers and the German friend. He was a very wonderful man.
He was also kindly, for I found afterwards that he had arranged with
the host to give me up his bed, seeing my weariness. For this, most
unluckily, I was never able to thank him, since the next morning I was
off before he or any one else was awake, and I left on the table such
money as I thought would very likely satisfy the innkeeper.
It was broad day, but not yet sunrise (there were watery thin clouds
left here and there from the day before, a cold wind drove them) when,
with extreme pain, going slowly one step after the other and resting
continually, I started for Porrentruy along a winding road, and
pierced the gap in the Jura. The first turn cut me off from France,
and I was fairly in a strange country.
The valley through which I was now passing resembled that of the
lovely river Jed where it runs down from the Cheviots, and leads like
a road into the secret pastures of the lowlands. Here also, as there,
steep cliffs of limestone bounded a very level dale, all green grass
and plenty; the plateau above them was covered also with perpetual
woods, only here, different from Scotland, the woods ran on and
upwards till they became the slopes of high mountains; indeed, this
winding cleft was a natural passage through the first ridge of the
Jura; the second stood up southward before me like a deep blue storm.
I had, as I passed on along this turning way, all the pleasures of
novelty; it was quite another country from the governed and ordered
France which I had left. The road was more haphazard, less carefully
tended, and evidently less used. The milestones were very old, and
marked leagues instead of kilometres. There was age in everything.
Moss grew along the walls, and it was very quiet under the high trees.
I did not know the name of the little river that went slowly through
the meadows, nor whether it followed the custom of its French
neighbours on the watershed, and was called by some such epithet as
hangs to all the waters in that gap of Belfort, that plain of ponds
and marshes:
