erent
world which has its own life, its settled inhabitants and its passing
travelers, its voices, its noises, and above all its mystery. Nothing is
more disturbing, nothing, more disquieting, more terrifying
occasionally, than a fen. Why should this terror hang over these low
plains covered with water? Is it the vague rustling of the rushes, the
strange Will-o'-the-wisps, the profound silence which envelops them on
calm nights, or is it the strange mists, which hang over the rushes like
a shroud; or else it is the imperceptible splashing, so slight and so
gentle, and sometimes more terrifying than the cannons of men or the
thunders of skies, which make these marshes resemble countries which
none has dreamed of, terrible countries concealing an unknown and
dangerous secret.

No, something else belongs to it, another mystery, more profound and
graver floats amid these thick mists, perhaps the mystery of the
creation itself! For was it not in stagnant and muddy water, amid the
heavy humidity of moist land under the heat of the sun, that the first
germ of life vibrated and expanded to the day?

* * * * *

I arrived at my cousin's in the evening. It was freezing hard enough to
split stones.

During dinner, in the large room whose sideboards, walls and ceilings
were covered with stuffed birds, with extended wings or perched on
branches to which they were nailed, hawks, herons, owls, nightjars,
buzzards, tiercels, vultures, falcons, my cousin, who himself resembled
some strange animal from a cold country, dressed in a sealskin jacket,
told me what preparations he had made for that same night.

We were to start at half past three in the morning, so as to arrive at
the place which he had chosen for our watching place at about half past
four. On that spot a hut had been built of lumps of ice, so as to
shelter us somewhat from the terrible wind which precedes daybreak, that
wind which is so cold that it tears the flesh as if with a saw, cuts it
like the blade of a knife and pricks it like a poisoned sting, twists it
like a pair of pincers, and burns it like fire.

My cousin rubbed his hands: "I have never known such a frost," he said;
"it is already twelve degrees below zero at six o'clock in the evening."

I threw myself onto my bed immediately after we had finished our meal,
and I went to sleep by the light of a bright fire burning in the grate.

At three o'clock he woke me. In my turn, I