n had burst the roof asunder, pierced the walls, thrown open
wide breaches on every side to some exterior foe. The gloomy framework
seemed to shake beneath some violent assault. Night was coming on
quickly.

Then, in the far distance, the priest heard a gentle murmur rising from
the valley of Les Artaud. The time had been when he had not understood
the impassioned language of those burning lands, where writhed but
knotted vine-stocks, withered almond-trees, and decrepit olives
sprawling with crippled limbs. Protected by his ignorance, he had passed
undisturbed through all that world of passion. But, to-day, his ear
detected the slightest sigh of the leaves that lay panting in the heat.
Afar off, on the edge of the horizon, the hills, still hot with the
sinking luminary's farewell, seemed to set themselves in motion with the
tramp of an army on the march. Nearer at hand, the scattered rocks,
the stones along the road, all the pebbles in the valley, throbbed and
rolled as if possessed by a craving for motion. Then the tracts of ruddy
soil, the few fields that had been reduced to cultivation, seemed to
heave and growl like rivers that had burst their banks, bearing along in
a blood-like flood the engenderings of seeds, the births of roots, the
embraces of plants. Soon everything was in motion. The vine-branches
appeared to crawl along like huge insects; the parched corn and the dry
grass formed into dense, lance-waving battalions; the trees stretched
out their boughs like wrestlers making ready for a contest; the fallen
leaves skipped forward; the very dust on the road rolled on. It was a
moving multitude reinforced by fresh recruits at every step; a legion,
the sound of whose coming went on in front of it; an outburst of
passionate life, sweeping everything along in a mighty whirlwind of
fruitfulness. And all at once the assault began. From the limits of
the horizon, the whole countryside, the hills and stones and fields and
trees, rushed upon the church. At the first shock, the building quivered
and cracked. The walls were pierced and the tiles on the roof were
thrown down. But the great Christ, although shaken, did not fall.

A short respite followed. Outside, the voices sounded more angrily, and
the priest could now distinguish human ones amongst them. The Artauds,
those bastards who sprang up out of the rocky soil with the persistence
of brambles, were now in their turn blowing a blast that reeked of
teeming life. Th