I have tried to say so—in too many words," said I.
My dog looked up at me, then with a slight sigh settled himself again beside the game bag and tucked his nose under his flank. On the whitewashed walls of the ancient, ruined fort behind us our shadows towered in the red sunset.
I turned and looked at the roofless, crumbling walls, then at the coast where jeweled surf tumbled, stained with crimson.
These shores had been washed with a redder stain in years gone by: these people were forever stamped with the eradicable scar of suffering borne by generations dead. The centuries had never spared them.
And, as I brooded there, watching two peasants, father and son, grubbing out the gorse below us to make a place for future wheat, the rose surf beyond seemed full of little rosy children and showy women, species of the endless massacres that this sad land had endlessly endured.
"They struck you hard and deep," I said, thinking of the past.
"Deep, Monsieur," he replied, understanding me. "Deep as your people's hatred."
"Oh, poor ça"—he made a vague gesture. "The dead are dead," he said, leaning over and opening my game bag to look into it and sort and count the few braces of partridge, snipe and widgeon.
Presently, from below, the peasants at work in the gorse, shouted up to us something that I did not understand.
They were standing close together, leaning on mattock and spade, grouped around something in the gorse.