Was not Amiel right when he said that “Un paysage est un état d’âme?”
It was an “ambrosial night,” in a place to attach affection, except that affection is not for places, either actually or in retrospect. One heart-beat faster, and the nitrate desert has fairy illusions. Why is it that merely seeing foreign sights leaves only craving, while a whiff of feeling in a distant, lonely spot fills one with the meaning and the mystery of everything and brings tears to the eyes of memory? The purple of the bare mountains is significant in the afterglow. Dripping water is significant. The moon sheds a different light. The heat of the desert sand just below the surface becomes suggestive. The air is filled with indefinable odors never perceived elsewhere, and the sight of a sand-colored bird explains all the secrets of the universe.
The beauty which alone would have woven a spell about the place merely lapsed into a background. In itself the voice was not faultless, nor the moon different from other windless, immaculate nights; but the air was sweeter, and the guavas were at the season’s climax, their one day of perfection. They tell you that if you eat guavas in Pica, you become either ill or enchanted; in either case you cannot leave.
He must have been talking for a long time. It was as if his voice had been beneath my range of sound, or too soft—though I heard well enough. All at once I began to understand.
“Perhaps you have heard of the bush which grows in Patagonia. It is covered with pale yellow flowers. When a match is placed beneath it, the bush blazes forth and is reduced to immediate ashes, all its strength exhausted in a single dazzling effort. It is called escandalosa.
“Had you let me know two weeks ago that you would come, I would have put a bit of nitrate on the roots of my rose-tree, and it would have blossomed viciously for you!”
“Yes,” I said, “but afterwards?”
“Oh, to be sure. Then it would have died.”
An owl screamed from the top of a ciruela tree, a little owl-of-the-desert, just a few inches high.
Pica, the Flower of the Sand! With what golden words borrowed from Hindoo poets might not its charm be told? By what enchantment its suave breezes be recalled? Everybody knows it is a magic spot. Its quiet existence is a sort of self-expression of inmost thoughts without technique.