I
The sun was beginning to shine.
I had been walking and walking....
I had just left the brambly path which cuts a bed of sand through the forest, laying bare its rusty bowels.
I felt full-fed by the subtle nourishment that space distils, crammed with air, and my forehead seemed drawn taut. Was it the motes dancing in the sunbeams? I don't know. I was spent. The fancy throbbed beneath my temples, did its work, and I let it go.
You must have been sincere at least once in your life to know what an hour is face to face with yourself, a whole hour, step by step, minute by minute. And I never had been sincere. Now I escaped from my clogging limbs, from the clay of myself. Until now I had done nothing but breathe and sleep. All of a sudden I was alive. It was intoxicating....
Dizzy though I was I felt an exhausting need to keep on going.
I penetrated deep into the woods walking at random, my mind almost a blank. When the leafy undergrowth enclosed me, I let myself slide to the ground on to the dried-up grass, the fallen twigs, and the crackling russet pine-needles.
All about in a dense circle, the rugged plant life. A moving splendor in the play of the varying greens. Damp, aromatic smells. And a sense of invisible swarming life everywhere....
The silence, so fresh and penetrating, was like a living thing, and I turned round several times thinking I heard some one behind me panting. No one. The uneven trunks of the great trees; lower down, behind their serrated green, a slate-colored screen of mist; here, the shadow-broidered ground; above, the patches of blue sky—and I.