In some places were great pools of water as calm as their greenish depths and as limpid and motionless as a woodland stream on its bed of cresses.  Then the rocks would reappear closer than before and more numerous.  On one side was the ocean with its breakers foaming around the lower rocks; on the other, the straight, unrelenting, impassive coast.

Tired and bewildered, we looked about us for some issue; but the cliff stretched out before us, and the rocks, infinitely multiplying their dark green forms, succeeded one another until their unequal crags seemed like so many tall, black phantoms rising out of the earth.

We stumbled around in this way until we suddenly perceived an undulating series of rough steps which enabled us to climb up to flat land again.

It is always a pleasure, even when the country is ugly, to walk with a friend, to feel the grass under one’s feet, to jump over fences and ditches, to break thistles with one’s stick, to pull leaves from the bushes and wheat from the fields, to go where one’s fancy dictates, whistling, singing, talking, dreaming, without strange ears to listen to one’s conversation, and the sound of strange footsteps behind one, as absolutely free as if one were in the desert!

Ah!  Let us have air! air!  And more space!  Since our contracted souls suffocate and die on the window-sill, since our captive spirits, like the bear in its cage, turn around and around, and stagger against the walls of their prison, why not, at least, let our nostrils breathe the different perfumes of all the winds of the earth, why not let our eyes rove over every horizon?

No steeple shone in the distance, no hamlet with thatched roofs and square yards framed by clusters of trees, appeared on the side of a hill; not a soul was to be seen, not even a peasant, a grazing sheep, or a stray dog.

All those cultivated fields look uninhabited; the peasants work in them, but they do not live there.  One is led to believe that they benefit by them but do not care about them in the least.

We saw a farm and walked in; a ragged woman served us some ice-cold milk in earthen cups.  The silence all around was peculiar.  The woman watched us eagerly, and we soon took our departure.

We walked into a valley, the narrow gorge of which appeared to extend to the ocean.  Tall grass with yellow flowers reached up to our waists, and we had to take long strides in order to advance.  We could hear the murmur of flowing water near by, and we sank ankle-deep into the marshy soil.  Presently the two hills parted; their barren sides were covered with short, stubby grass and here and there were big yellow patches of moss.  At the foot of one hill a stream wends its way through the drooping boughs of the stunted shrubs that grow on its edges, and loses itself in a quiet pond where long-legged insects disport themselves on the leaves of the water-lilies.  The sun beat down on us.  The gnats rubbed their wings together and bent the slender ends of the reeds with the weight of their tiny bodies.  We were alone in the tranquillity of this desert.