The Catalans: A Novel Read Free Page B

loaf and a skin of wine and an onion and work there until dark. Now what does he do?”
    The train was running fast now, lickety-lick across the plain, the plain with its drilled armies of peach trees, almonds, and apricots stretching away in interminable files: a hundred times a minute a perspective opened, a straight lane of precise trees with a green stream of garden-stuff running down between; the perspective opened, slanting rapidly to the full, held there for an instant, slanted fast away and was gone as the next began to open; and between each pair there was a fragmentary hint of diagonals, opened and closed so quickly that nothing could be distinguished but a sense of ordered space. Most of the peaches were picked already, but still there were a few late orchards with the fruit glowing among the leaves, peaches that looked too big for the trees: they would be the big dorats, he thought, and the word brought the memory of that wonderful bitter-sweet prussic-acid taste and the smell of the downy skin.
    They passed Corneilla del Vercol, and he had hardly said to himself “Now we begin to turn” when he felt the beginning of the centrifugal pressure, his weight pressing outward against the side, as the train ran fast on to the long curve down to the sea, and the Canigou came into sight, sharp and clear in the morning sky, still the morning sky, for it was hardly more than breakfast-time. There was a belt of cloud lying across the middle height, but the three tall peaks stabbed up hard and dominating. It was the mountain that ruled the plain; and the plain seen without the mountain was nothing but a dull stretch of intensely cultivated land instead of a preparation and the foreground for a magnificent piece of set scenery: a little obvious and romantic, perhaps, but superb in its kind, composed on the very grandest scale, and instantly, overwhelming effective.
    The long curve went on: the Canigou moved imperceptibly into the middle of the window, and now by leaning against the glass and peering forward he could see the long curtain of the Pyrenees, dark, with the sun behind them. That was the limit of the plain, the wall of dark mountains that ran headlong to the sea, and that was his own piece of the world, there where the sea and the mountains joined.
    It was very near now. On the skyline he could see the towers, high up, remote against the sky, the ancient solitary towers against the Algerine rovers, the Moors who had sacked the coast for so many hundred years; they stood one behind the other, far spaced, to carry the alarm like beacons: they were his final landmarks. The train bore away and away to the left, running directly now for the edge of the sea, for there was no way through the mountains, and even at the very rim of the land it was tunnel and cutting, cutting and tunnel all the way, to get along at all.
    The round towers, remote and deserted on the high bare peaks, had always been the symbols of homecoming for him, for he had been able to see them from his bedroom window as a boy, and for ever after, when he came back from school or from the university or (as he did now) from foreign parts, it always appeared to him that this was the last of the last steps, for looking up to those far towers his line of sight could be reflected down, through his own window, back into his bedroom.
    They had crossed the river, and the richest of the plain was left behind: there were trees and rectangles of market-garden still, but they were islands in the blue-green sea of vines. An ocean of vines, that would make your heart ache to think of the picking of all the grapes. He got up, worked through the legs and the crossing lines of talk and stood in the corridor to watch for the first arrival of the sea on the other side.
    Already the plain was finished. They were running through the first hills, the hills that started with such abrupt determination, instantly changing the very nature of the countryside. Now the sandy cuttings