II.
The boat is made fast to a boom, under a pile of white houses: it is Royan.
Here already are the sea and the dunes; the right of the village is buried under a mass of sand; there are crumbling hills, little dreary valleys, where you are lost as if in the desert; no sound, no movement, no life; scanty, leafless vegetation dots the moving soil, and its filaments fall like sickly hairs; small shells, white and empty, cling to these in chaplets, and, wherever the foot is set, they crack with a sound like a cricket’s chirp; this place is the ossuary of some wretched maritime tribe. One tree alone can live here, the pine, a wild creature, inhabitant of the forests and sterile coasts; there is a whole colony of them here; they crowd together fraternally, and cover the sand with their brown lamels; the monotonous breeze which sifts through them forever awakes their murmur; thus they chant in a plaintive fashion, but with a far softer and more harmonious voice
than the other trees; this voice resembles the grating of the cicadæ when in August they sing with all their heart among the stalks of the ripened wheat.
[FULL-SIZE] -- [Medium-Size]
At the left of the village, a footpath winds to the summit of a wasted bank, among billows of standing grasses. The river is so broad that the other shore is not distinguishable. The sea, its neighbor, imparts its refluence; its long undulations come one after another against the coast, and pour their little cascades of foam upon the sand; then the water retires, running down the slope until it meets a new wave coming up which covers it; these billows are never wearied, and their come and go remind one of the regular breathing of a slumbering child. For night has fallen, the tints of purple grow brown and fade away. The river goes to rest in the soft, vague shadow; scarcely, at long intervals, a remnant glimmer is reflected from a slanting wave; obscurity drowns everything in its vapory dust; the drowsy eye vainly searches in this mist some visible point, and distinguishes at last, like a dim star, the lighthouse of Cordouan.