And the interval between her death and her burial I
spent along the lake's shore. The same weather continued day after
day, and it is almost impossible to find words to express the beauty
of the grey reflection of the islands and the reeds, and the faint
evanescent shores floating away, disappearing in the sun-haze, and the
silence about the shores, a kind of enchanted silence, interrupted, as
I have said, only by the low gurgle of the water about the limestone
shingle. Now and then the song of a bird would break out, and all was
silence again.... "A silence that seems to come out of the very heart
of things!" I said, and I stopped to listen, like one at the world's
end; I walked on, wondering, through the rushes and tussocked grass
and juniper bushes which grew along the wilding shore, along the edge
of the wood. Coming from the town, I could not but admire the
emptiness of the country; hardly ever did I hear the sound of a human
voice or a footstep; only once did I meet some wood-gatherers, poor
women carrying bundles of faggots, bent under their loads. And
thinking that perchance I knew them--they were evidently from the
village; if so, I must have known them when I was a boy--I was
suddenly seized by an unaccountable dread or a shyness, occasioned no
doubt by the sense of the immense difference that time had effected in
us: they were the same, but I was different.
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