At these words those mariners, half-dead already, recovered, all rushed to the hold and began then to work in it. And they worked from morning till night in the sweat of their brows and with effort, seeking thus to retrieve their past sloth and their blindness.
THE CRANES
IV
THE CRANES
Homesickness (nostalgia) tortures mainly people who for various reasons are utterly unable to return to their own country, but even those for whom return is merely a question of will power feel its attacks sometimes. The cause may be anything: a sunrise or a sunset which calls to mind a dawn or an evening at home, some note of a foreign song in which the rhythm of one’s own country is heard, some group of trees which call to mind remotely the native village—anything suffices!