“Already the arms of the sign of our redemption were outspread, already the upper end was beginning to take form, when the fiendish, glowing mass writhed anew, as if in frightful convulsion, and enfolding the unfortunate workmen, who struggled to free themselves from its deadly embrace, glittered in rings like a serpent or contracted itself in zigzag like lightning.
“Incessant labor, faith, prayers and holy water succeeded, at last, in overcoming the infernal spirit, and the armor was converted into a cross.
“This cross it is you have seen to-day, the cross in which the Devil who gives it its name is bound. Before it the young people in the month of May place no clusters of lilies, nor do the shepherds uncover as they pass by, nor the old folk kneel; the strict admonitions of the priest scarcely prevent the boys from stoning it.
“God has closed His ears to all supplications offered Him in its presence. In the winter, packs of wolves gather about the juniper which overshadows it to rush upon the herds; banditti wait in its shade for travellers whose slain bodies they bury at its foot, and when the tempest rages, the lightnings deviate from their course to meet, hissing, at the head of this cross and to rend the stones of its pedestal.”
THREE DATES
IN a portfolio which I still treasure, full of idle drawings made during some of my semi-artistic excursions to the city of Toledo, are written three dates.
The events whose memory these figures keep are up to a certain point insignificant.
Nevertheless, by recollecting them I have entertained myself on certain wakeful nights in shaping a novel more or less sentimental or sombre, in proportion as my imagination found itself more or less exalted, and disposed toward the humorous or tragic view of life.
If on the morning following one of these darkling, delirious reveries, I had tried to write out the extraordinary episodes of the impossible fictions which I invented before my eyelids utterly closed, these romances, whose dim dénouement finally floats undetermined on that sea between waking and sleep, would assuredly form a book of preposterous inconsistencies but original and peradventure interesting.
This is not what I am attempting now. These light—one might almost say impalpable—fantasies are in a sense like butterflies which cannot be caught in the hands without there being left between the fingers the golden dust of their wings.