Anomalous beeches sustain the slopes here; no description can give an idea of these stunted colossi, eight feet high, and round which three men could not reach. Beaten back by the wind that desolates the declivity, their sap has been accumulating for centuries in huge, stunted, twisted and interlaced branches; all embossed with knots misshapen and blackened, they stretch and coil themselves fantastically, like limbs swollen by disease and distended by a supreme effort.
[FULL-SIZE] -- [Medium-Size]
Through the split bark may be seen the vegetable muscles enrolling themselves about the trunk, and crushing each other like the limbs of wrestlers. These squat torsos, half overthrown, almost horizontal, lean toward the plain; but their feet bury themselves among the rocks with such ties, that sooner than break that forest of roots, one might tear out a side of the mountain. Now and then a trunk, rotted by water, breaks open, hideously eventerated; the edges of the wound spread farther apart with every year; they wear no longer the shape of trees, and yet they live, and cannot be conquered by winter, by their slope, nor by time, but boldly put forth into their native air their whitish shoots. If, under the shades of evening, you pass by the tortured tops and yawning trunks of these old inhabitants of the mountains, when the wind is beating the branches, you seem to hear a hollow plaint, extorted by a century’s toil; these strange forms recall the fantastic creatures of the old Scandinavian mythology. You think on the giants imprisoned by fate, between walls that contracted day by day, and bent them down and lessened them, and then returned them to the light, after a thousand years of torture, furious, misshapen and dwarfed.
V.
Toward four o’clock the cavalcades return; the small horses of the country are gentle, and gallop without too much effort; far away in the sunlight gleam the white and luminous veils of the ladies; nothing is more graceful than a pretty woman on horseback, when she is neither imprisoned in a black riding-habit, nor topped with a chimney-pot hat. Nobody here wears this funereal, poverty-stricken English costume; in a gay country people assume gay colors; the sun is a oood counsellor. It is forbidden to return at a gallop, o which is reason enough why everybody should return at that gait. Ah, the great art of imitating the coming in of the cattle! They bend in the saddle, the highway resounds, the windows quiver, they sweep proudly before the saunterers who stop to gaze; it is a triumph; the administration of Eaux Bonnes does not know the human heart, especially the heart of woman.
In the evening, everybody meets on a level promenade; it is a flat road half a league long, cut in the mountain of Gourzy. The remainder of the country is nothing but steeps and precipices; any one who for eight days has known the fatigue of climbing bent double, of stumbling down hill, of studying the laws of equilibrium while flat on his back, will find it agreeable to walk on level ground, and to move his feet freely without thinking of his head; it gives a perfectly new sensation of security and ease.