dmirable civility and equality of French civilisation, he suggested
without either eagerness or embarrassment that he should take me in his
fly for an hour's ride in the hills beyond the town. And though it was
growing late I consented; for there was one long white road under an
archway and round a hill that dragged me like a long white cord. We
drove through the strong, squat gateway that was made by Romans, and I
remember the coincidence like a sort of omen that as we passed out of
the city I heard simultaneously the three sounds which are the trinity
of France. They make what some poet calls "a tangled trinity," and I am
not going to disentangle it. Whatever those three things mean, how
or why they co-exist; whether they can be reconciled or perhaps are
reconciled already; the three sounds I heard then by an accident all
at once make up the French mystery. For the brass band in the Casino
gardens behind me was playing with a sort of passionate levity some
ramping tune from a Parisian comic opera, and while this was going on
I heard also the bugles on the hills above, that told of terrible
loyalties and men always arming in the gate of France; and I heard also,
fainter than these sounds and through them all, the Angelus.

.....

After this coincidence of symbols I had a curious sense of having left
France behind me, or, perhaps, even the civilised world. And, indeed,
there was something in the landscape wild enough to encourage such
a fancy. I have seen perhaps higher mountains, but I have never
seen higher rocks; I have never seen height so near, so abrupt and
sensational, splinters of rock that stood up like the spires of
churches, cliffs that fell sudden and straight as Satan fell from
heaven. There was also a quality in the ride which was not only
astonishing, but rather bewildering; a quality which many must have
noticed if they have driven or ridden rapidly up mountain roads. I mean
a sense of gigantic gyration, as of the whole earth turning about one's
head. It is quite inadequate to say that the hills rose and fell like
enormous waves. Rather the hills seemed to turn about me like the
enormous sails of a windmill, a vast wheel of monstrous archangelic
wings. As we drove on and up into the gathering purple of the sunset
this dizziness increased, confounding things above with things below.
Wide walls of wooded rock stood out above my head like a roof. I stared
at them until I fancied that I was staring down at