Urien's Voyage Read Free

oriental night, will you at last bring relief to a tired brain obsessed by thoughts of God?”
    â€œI was tormented by a desire for conquest,” said Paride; “I paced my room, valiant but sad, and more exhausted by dreams of heroic acts than by their performance. What conquests lie before us now? what noble deeds? where are we going? Tell me! Do you know where this ship is taking us?” Not one of us knew, but all of us trembled on sensing our courage.
    â€œWhat are we doing here,” he continued, “and what just what is this life if the other one was our sleep?”
    â€œPerhaps we are living our dream as we sleep in our rooms,” said Nathanael.
    â€œOr perhaps we’re searching for regions to satisfy our souls,” said Mélian.
    But Tradelineau shouted: “Without a doubt, the fallacy of using vain logic and believing that you can do a thing well only if its causes are known, still enslaves you and motivates this pointless discussion. Why try to imbue our presence on the Orion with highly mysterious motives? We left our books because they bored us, because an unconscious remembrance of the sea and the real sky destroyed our faith in study; something else existed; and when warm, balsamic breezes came to stir the curtains on our windows, we descended willy-nilly toward the plain and began our journey. We were tired of thought, we wanted action; did you see how our souls turned joyous when, taking from the rowers their heavy oars, we felt the liquid blue resist! Oh, the Orion will surely carry us to distant shores. The spasms of courage that we experience will of themselves elicit feats of valor; let’s hope for the best as we wait for our glorious destinies to unfold.” *
    That night we also spoke of the tumultuous town where we had embarked, of its fairs and of the crowd.
    â€œWhy keep thinking about those people whose eyes saw only things and who were not even astounded?” said Angleval. “I liked the way Bohordin was sobbing during the circus acts; everything should be done as a rite; those people were watching the performances unceremoniously.”
    â€œWhat do you think of all this, Urien?” Angaire asked me.
    And I replied: “One must always represent.” *
    Then, since the discussion was becoming unbearable for all of us and since thinking exhausted us, we promised not to speak further of the past or argue about things. Morning was approaching; we parted to sleep.
    We had lost sight of the coasts and had been sailing on the open sea for three days when we came upon these beautiful floating islands that a mysterious current had been moving toward us for a long time. And our parallel flight in the midst of the incessantly agitated waves at first made us think the Orion motionless, stranded perhaps on the sand, but our illusion vanished when we examined the islands more closely. A boat brought us down to one of them; they were all almost identical and equally spaced. Their regular shape made us think that they were madrepores; they would undoubtedly have been quite flat without the luxuriant and magnificent vegetation that covered them; toward the front the slightly uneven coral reefs, wherever their roots were exposed, were as gray as volcanic stones; toward the rear they floatedlike tresses, their roots reddened by the sea. Trees of unknown species, exotic trees bent under the weight of heavy bindweeds, and delicate orchids blended their flowers with the leafage. These were sea-gardens; flights of insects followed them; pollen trailed along on the waves.
    The impenetrable underbrush forced us to walk along the edge of the shore, and often, when branches overhung the water, to crawl between them, clutching roots and vines.
    We wanted to remain to the rear for a while and watch the huge insects fly, but the stifling perfumes that arose from the whole island and were carried to us on the wind, the perfumes that were already making our heads swim,