e 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