Anatolia had stopped sobbing, but the traces of tears were still on her face, and the eyelids that she kept lowered were red. “Let us go,” she said softly, without looking either at me or at her sister.
And in silence, under the desolation of the sunshine, we began the descent, accompanied by the rumbling sound.
Miserable descent, which seemed as if it would never end! They walked on, or lingered behind, according to the necessities of the path; and I supported sometimes the one, and sometimes the other, when their steps faltered. Every now and then my heart failed me with the fear of seeing them succumb. When the bells of Secli ceased ringing we felt a momentary relief; but we discovered immediately that the oppressive irregularity of our breathing in the stillness of the air increased our suffering, and we felt as though we could hear only too distinctly the murmur of the blood in our veins.
With a savage pertinacity Violante persisted in braving suffocation under her blue mask. No doubt her throat must be parched with a horrible thirst, like mine, like her sister’s. When I took her hand to help her down, I saw a little blood where the skin had been grazed through the rents in her glove; and with deep emotion I remembered the hill-slope covered with flowers.
Later on, when we reached the level ground, where my men were waiting with the mules, and where we rested awhile parched with thirst and exhausted by fatigue, I composed the beauty and the sorrow of the three princesses, for the last time, into a harmony of infinite beauty and pain.
They were not in their cloistered garden, yet a rocky cloister worthy of their souls and their fate was surrounding them, for strange and grand was the aspect of the scenery around. The rocks, standing round in a circle of varying height, made one think of some amphitheatre built by Cyclopean hands, worn away, indeed, by centuries and storms without number, yet still remaining like stupendous ruins. Fragments of unknown writing were traceable there, incomprehensible riddles of Life and Death; the twisted veins of the stone were channels for the essence of a divine thought; and the lines of the shapeless masses were as full of meaning as the attitudes of perfect statues.
There we rested, there I caught their final harmony.
A field labourer—very like the one who had cut the branches of almond blossom for us with his bill-hook—showed us the way to a spring hidden in the hollow of a rock. The clear, icy water spurted out with a gentle murmur, and on the pool beneath floated a rustic cup made of bark, cracked and bottomless, like the useless husk of some fruit.
I offered Anatolia another cup, which the man had brought with him. But Violante, without waiting, raised her veil, and bending over the sparkling spring, drank in long draughts like a wild animal.