[FULL-SIZE] -- [Medium-Size]
Then all was hushed; the sun has burst forth, the waves were smoothed, you now saw only a laughing expanse; spun out over this polished back a thousand greenish tresses sported wantonly; the light rested on it, like a diaphanous mantle; it followed the supple movements and the twisting of those liquid arms; it folded around them, behind them, its radiant, azure robe; it took their caprices and their mobile colors; the river meanwhile, slumbrous in its great, peaceful bed, was stretched out at the feet of the hills, which looked down upon it, like it immovable and eternal.
[FULL-SIZE] -- [Medium-Size]
II.
The boat is made fast to a boom, under a pile of white houses: it is Royan.
Here already are the sea and the dunes; the right of the village is buried under a mass of sand; there are crumbling hills, little dreary valleys, where you are lost as if in the desert; no sound, no movement, no life; scanty, leafless vegetation dots the moving soil, and its filaments fall like sickly hairs; small shells, white and empty, cling to these in chaplets, and, wherever the foot is set, they crack with a sound like a cricket’s chirp; this place is the ossuary of some wretched maritime tribe. One tree alone can live here, the pine, a wild creature, inhabitant of the forests and sterile coasts; there is a whole colony of them here; they crowd together fraternally, and cover the sand with their brown lamels; the monotonous breeze which sifts through them forever awakes their murmur; thus they chant in a plaintive fashion, but with a far softer and more harmonious voice
than the other trees; this voice resembles the grating of the cicadæ when in August they sing with all their heart among the stalks of the ripened wheat.