Peninsulas of the Mediterranean, and then they suck back like a tide
homewards, having accomplished nothing but an epic.
Then on the left you have all the Germanics, a great sea of confused
and dreaming people, lost in philosophies and creating music, frozen
for the moment under a foreign rigidity, but some day to thaw again
and to give a word to us others. They cannot long remain apart from
visions.
Then in front of you southward and eastward, if you are marching to
Rome, come the Highlanders. I had never been among them, and I was to
see them in a day; the people of the high hills, the race whom we all
feel to be enemies, and who run straight across the world from the
Atlantic to the Pacific, understanding each other, not understood by
us. I saw their first rampart, the mountains called the Jura, on the
horizon, and above my great field of view the clouds still tumbled,
lit from beneath with evening.
I tired of these immensities, and, feeling now my feet more broken
than ever, I very slowly and in sharp shoots of pain dragged down the
slope towards the main road: I saw just below me the frontier stones
of the Prussians, and immediately within them a hut.
