“All right,” I replied, and set my horse at a gallop over the old stone bridge.
The highway to the sea which winds down through acres of yellow gorse and waving broom to the cliffs of Paradise is a breezy road, swept by the sweet winds that blow across Brittany from the Côte d’Or to the Pyrenees.
It is a land of sea-winds; and when in the still noontide of midsummer the winds are at play far out at sea, their traces remain in the furrowed wheat, in the incline of solitary trees, in the breezy trend of the 163 cliff-clover and the blackthorn and the league-wide sweep of the moorlands.
And through this land whose inland perfume always savored the unseen sea I rode down to Paradise.
It was not until I had galloped through the golden forest of Kerselec that I came in sight of the ocean, although among the sunbeams and the dropping showers of yellow beech-leaves I fancied I could hear the sound of the surf.
And now I rode slowly, in full sight of the sea where it lay, an immense gray band across the world, touching a looming horizon, and in throat and nostril the salt stung sweetly, and the whole world seemed younger for the breath of the sea.
From the purple mystery of the horizon to the landward cliffs the ocean appeared motionless; it was only when I had advanced almost to the cliffs that I saw the movement of waves—that I perceived the contrast between inland inertia and the restless repose of the sea, stirring ceaselessly since creation.
The same little sparkling river I had crossed in Quimperlé I now saw again, spreading out a wide, flat current which broke into waves where it tumbled seaward across the bar; I heard the white-winged gulls mewing, the thunderous monotone of the surf, and a bell in some unseen chapel ringing sweetly.
I passed a stone house, another; then the white road curved under the trees and I rode straight into the heart of Paradise, my horse’s hoofs awaking echoes in the silent, stone-paved square.
Never had I so suddenly entered a place so peaceful, so quiet in the afternoon sun—yet the silence was not absolute, it was thrilling with exquisite sound, lost echoes of the river running along its quay of stone, half-heard harmonies of the ocean where white surf seethed over the sands beyond the headland. 164