He was awakened by the sun, whose pitiless beams falling vertically upon the granite rock produced an intolerable heat.  The Provencal had ignorantly flung himself down in a contrary direction to the shadows thrown by the verdant and majestic fronds of the palm-trees.  He gazed at these solitary monarchs and shuddered.  They recalled to his mind the graceful shafts, crowned with long weaving leaves, which distinguish the Saracenic columns of the cathedral of Arles.  The thought overcame him, and when, after counting the trees, he threw his eyes upon the scene around him, an agony of despair convulsed his soul.  He saw a limitless ocean.  The sombre sands of the desert stretched out till lost to sight in all directions; they glittered with dark lustre like a steel blade shining in the sun.  He could not tell if it were an ocean or a chain of lakes that lay mirrored before him.  A hot vapor swept in waves above the surface of this heaving continent.  The sky had the Oriental glow of translucent purity, which disappoints because it leaves nothing for the imagination to desire.  The heavens and the earth were both on fire.  Silence added its awful and desolate majesty.  Infinitude, immensity pressed down upon the soul on every side; not a cloud in the sky, not a breath in the air, not a rift on the breast of the sand, which was ruffled only with little ridges scarcely rising above its surface.  Far as the eye could reach the horizon fell away into space, marked by a slender line, slim as the edge of a sabre,—­like as in summer seas a thread of light parts this earth from the heaven it meets.

The Provencal clasped the trunk of a palm-tree as if it were the body of a friend.  Sheltered from the sun by its straight and slender shadow, he wept; and presently sitting down he remained motionless, contemplating with awful dread the implacable Nature stretched out before him.  He cried aloud, as if to tempt the solitude to answer him.  His voice, lost in the hollows of the hillock, sounded afar with a thin resonance that returned no echo; the echo came from the soldier’s heart.  He was twenty-two years old, and he loaded his carbine.

“Time enough!” he muttered, as he put the liberating weapon on the sand beneath him.

Gazing by turns at the burnished blackness of the sand and the blue expanse of the sky, the soldier dreamed of France.  He smelt in fancy the gutters of Paris; he remembered the towns through which he had passed, the faces of his comrades, and the most trifling incidents of his life.  His southern imagination saw the pebbles of his own Provence in the undulating play of the heated air, as it seemed to roughen the far-reaching surface of the desert.  Dreading the dangers of this cruel mirage, he went down the little hill on the side opposite to that by which he had gone up the night before.  His joy was great when he discovered a natural grotto, formed by the immense blocks of granite which made a foundation