The next day (Tuesday, September 24th), it was two o'clock in the
afternoon before I got my journal written up and my knapsack repaired,
for I was determined to carry my knapsack in the future and have no more
ado with baskets; and half an hour afterwards I set out for Le Cheylard
l'Eveque, a place on the borders of the forest of Mercoire. A man, I was
told, should walk there in an hour and a half; and I thought it scarce
too ambitious to suppose that a man encumbered with a donkey might cover
the same distance in four hours.
All the way up the long hill from Langogne it rained and hailed
alternately; the wind kept freshening steadily, although slowly;
plentiful hurrying clouds - some dragging veils of straight rain-shower,
others massed and luminous as though promising snow - careered out of the
north and followed me along my way. I was soon out of the cultivated
basin of the Allier, and away from the ploughing oxen, and such-like
sights of the country. Moor, heathery marsh, tracts of rock and pines,
woods of birch all jewelled with the autumn yellow, here and there a few
naked cottages and bleak fields, - these were the characters of the
country. Hill and valley followed valley and hill; the little green and
stony cattle-tracks wandered in and out of one another, split into three
or four, died away in marshy hollows, and began again sporadically on
hillsides or at the borders of a wood.
There was no direct road to Cheylard, and it was no easy affair to make a
passage in this uneven country and through this intermittent labyrinth of
tracks. It must have been about four when I struck Sagnerousse, and went
on my way rejoicing in a sure point of departure. Two hours afterwards,
the dusk rapidly falling, in a lull of the wind, I issued from a fir-wood
where I had long been wandering, and found, not the looked-for village,
but another marish bottom among rough-and-tumble hills. For some time
past I had heard the ringing of cattle-bells ahead; and now, as I came
out of the skirts of the wood, I saw near upon a dozen cows and perhaps
as many more black figures, which I conjectured to be children, although
the mist had almost unrecognisably exaggerated their forms. These were
all silently following each other round and round in a circle, now taking
hands, now breaking up with chains and reverences. A dance of children
appeals to very innocent and lively thoughts; but, at nightfall on the
marshes, the thing was eerie and fantastic to behold. Even I, who am
well enough read in Herbert Spencer, felt a sort of silence fall for an
instant on my mind. The next, I was pricking Modestine forward, and
guiding her like an unruly ship through the open. In a path, she went
doggedly ahead of her own accord, as before a fair wind; but once on the
turf or among heather, and the brute became demented.
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