Ishmael superintended the pouring of a sack of dredge-corn into the gaping maw of the drill, and the man took the rope reins, and, throwing over the lever, set the horses off, following as faithfully as might be the curve of the hedge.  The sun gleamed on the glossy haunches of the horses, on the upper curve of the spidery wheels, whose faded vermilion seemed to revolve under a quivering splash of living gold that magically stayed poised, as it were, to let the wheels slip perpetually from under.  The wind blew the horses’ forelocks away between their ears; while about their plumy fetlocks, wreathing around the wheels and the sharp nozzles of the drill and from the heavy feet of the man who followed, rose the blown clouds of powdery soil, as though the earth were smoking at some vast sacrifice.

All the way up and down the field, back and forth, with a clanking as the lever was thrown in and out of gear for the turn at either end, this cloud went with them, blowing fine and free, encompassing them high as the horses’ bellies.  Ishmael watched, checked the man at the turn, and finding the corn was flowing too freely, altered the indicator, and then himself took the reins and in his turn went up and down the lines of smoking earth.  And gradually, as he went, his sense of sight, and through it his brain, became gently mesmerised as the shallow furrows made by the nozzles of the drill drew themselves perpetually just before him.  He could see the bright seeds dribbling into the top of the serpentine tubes, but no eye could catch their swift transit into the earth, which closed and tossed over itself in the wake of the nozzles as foam turns and throws itself about in the wake of a screw.  Ishmael, his eyes on that living earth that surged so rhythmically yet with such freedom of pattern that no clod fell like another, while the dust blew back from it like spray, was soothed in exactly the same way that a man is soothed when he watches the weaving of the foam-patterns as they slip perpetually from beneath a ship.

Every year upon his farm there now came something of the joy of the gambler to Ishmael, who never sowed without feeling that it might be for the last time.  Curiously enough, it never occurred to him as possible that he could die before what he had sown was grown and reaped.  Every threshing over, he wondered if he should live to see another; every sowing he told himself it might be the last time he saw the earth closing over the trail of the seeds, that before another spring came round the earth might be closed over him instead, and this gave an extra keenness of appreciation to all he did and watched.  Now, as he sowed, peace seemed to come to him as well as pleasure, a feeling that though sowing was always for a blind future, yet that future was as securely in the womb of the thought of God as the seeds in the womb of the earth.  He walked on, up and down, till the last furrow had been sown and the seeds lay all hidden and the ruffled earth only awaited the quieting of the roller.  Then he leant upon the drill and stared out over the acres that were to him as the flesh of his flesh; he bent down and crumpled a clod between his fingers for sheer joy of the feel of it.