design! What a downfall is here! To be awakened from
that disdainful sleep of twenty centuries and made to carry the floating
barracks of Thomas Cook & Son, to feed sugar factories, and to
exhaust itself in nourishing with its mud the raw material for English
cotton-stuffs.

CHAPTER XII

IN THE TEMPLE OF THE GODDESS OF LOVE AND JOY

It is the month of March, but as gay and splendid as in our June. Around
us are fields of corn, of lucerne, and the flowering bean. And the
air is full of restless birds, singing deliriously for very joy in
the voluptuous business of their nests and coveys. Our way lies over a
fertile soil, saturated with vital substances--some paradise for beasts
no doubt, for they swarm on every side: flocks of goats with a
thousand bleating kids; she-asses with their frisking young; cows and
cow-buffaloes feeding their calves; all turned loose among the crops, to
browse at their leisure, as if there were here a superabundance of the
riches of the soil.

What country is this that shows no sign of human habitation, that
knows no village, nor any distant spire? The crops are like ours at
home--wheat, lucerne, and the flowering bean that perfumes the air with
its white blossoms. But there is an excess of light in the sky and, in
the distance, an extraordinary clearness. And then these fertile plains,
that might be those of some "Promised Land," seem to be bounded far
away, on left and right, by two parallel stone walls, two chains of
rose-coloured mountains, whose aspect is obviously desertlike. Besides,
amongst the numerous animals that are familiar, there are camels,
feeding their strange nurslings that look like four-legged ostriches.
And finally some peasants appear beyond in the cornfields; they are
veiled in long black draperies. It is the East then, an African land, or
some oasis of Arabia?

The sun at this moment is hidden from us by a band of clouds, that
stretches, right above our head, from one end of the sky to the other,
like a long skein of white wool. It is alone in the blue void, and seems
to make more peaceful, and even a little mysterious, the wonderful
light of the fields we traverse--these fields intoxicated with life
and vibrant with the music of birds; while, by contrast, the distant
landscape, unshaded by clouds, is resplendent with a more incisive
clearness and the desert beyond seems deluged with rays.

The pathway that we have been following, ill defined as it is in the