“A species of shadow?” I repeated in astonishment.
“Yes, there are trees of shadow and trees of light. Did you not know that?”
And then while her father listened to her tenderly as she instructed me in her turn, she obligingly taught me how to distinguish them. Trees of light are the oak, which, despite the fable, resists the storm, the exquisite but robust birch, the pitch pine, which still grows at an altitude of eighteen hundred metres, and the even hardier larch, which attains the land of external snow; the shadow trees are the fir and the beech, with their delicate organisms, sensitive to frost, the attacks of the sun and the lack of water. They too bravely attempt to storm the mountain, but they are in too close touch with the elements. Whatever affects the earth, affects them. They forecast the atmospheric changes. They experience the suffering of the sun as well as its joy, for which they hasten to smile with due gravity. In them the heart of the world beats more delicately. The others are harder and their fate simpler.
I at once placed myself among the trees of light. One morning, Raymonde picked up a seed which was supplied with a wing.
“The trees fly,” she told me. “See how the wind can carry them along!”
At the border of the forest she threw the tiny seed in the air with this incantation:
“Go find favourable soil, and grow to shelter a happy home some day.”
Before she tossed it to the wind, I studied the little wing attentively. Those of the birds had never inspired me with any desire to rival them, but this little vegetable membrane disturbed me. Later I recalled this omen of the forest....
* * *
Thus our walks were full of sweetness.