The Wind, From Which I Had Escaped, 'as
From An Enemy,' Was Seemingly Quite Local.
It carried no clouds
with it, and came from such a quarter that it did not trouble the
sea within view.
The two castles, black and ruinous as the rocks
about them, were still distinguishable from these by something more
insecure and fantastic in the outline, something that the last
storm had left imminent and the next would demolish entirely. It
would be difficult to render in words the sense of peace that took
possession of me on these three afternoons. It was helped out, as
I have said, by the contrast. The shore was battered and bemauled
by previous tempests; I had the memory at heart of the insane
strife of the pigmies who had erected these two castles and lived
in them in mutual distrust and enmity, and knew I had only to put
my head out of this little cup of shelter to find the hard wind
blowing in my eyes; and yet there were the two great tracts of
motionless blue air and peaceful sea looking on, unconcerned and
apart, at the turmoil of the present moment and the memorials of
the precarious past. There is ever something transitory and
fretful in the impression of a high wind under a cloudless sky; it
seems to have no root in the constitution of things; it must
speedily begin to faint and wither away like a cut flower. And on
those days the thought of the wind and the thought of human life
came very near together in my mind.
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