Hills and the Sea | Page 9

to eat, some had ended. When we asked for food it was prepared, but an hour was taken to prepare it, and it was very vile; the wine also was a wine that tasted as much of leather as of grapes, and reminded a man more of an old saddle than of vineyards.
The people who put this before us had in their faces courage, complete innocence, carelessness, and sleep. They spoke to us in their language (I understood it very ill) of far countries, which they did not clearly know--they hardly knew the French beyond the hills. As no road led into their ageless village, so did no road lead out of it. To reach the great cities in the plain, and the railway eighty miles away, why, there was the telephone. They slept at such late hours as they chose; by midnight many were still clattering through the lane below. No order and no law compelled them in anything.
The Two Men were asleep after this first astonishing glimpse of forgotten men and of a strange country. In the stifling air outside there was a clattering of the hoofs of mules and an argument of drivers. A long way off a man was playing a little stringed instrument, and there was also in the air a noise of insects buzzing in the night heat; when all of a sudden the whole place awoke to the noise of a piercing cry which but for its exquisite tone might have been the cry of pain, so shrill was it and so coercing to the ear. It was maintained, and before it fell was followed by a succession of those quarter-tones which only the Arabs have, and which I had thought finally banished from Europe. To this inhuman and appalling song were set loud open vowels rather than words.
Of the Two Men, one leapt at once from his bed crying out, "This is the music! This is what I have desired to hear!" For this is what he had once been told could be heard in the desert, when first he looked out over the sand from Atlas: but though he had travelled far, he had never heard it, and now he heard it here, in the very root of these European hills. It was on this account that he cried out, "This is the music!" And when he had said this he put on a great rough cloak and ran to the room from which the song or cry proceeded, and after him ran his companion.
The Two Men stood at the door behind a great mass of muleteers, who all craned forward to where, upon a dais at the end of the room, sat a Jewess who still continued for some five minutes this intense and terrible effort of the voice. Beside her a man who was not of her race urged her on as one urges an animal to further effort, crying out, "Hap! Hap!" and beating his palms together rhythmically and driving and goading her to the full limit of her power.
The sound ceased suddenly as though it had been stabbed and killed, and the woman whose eyes had been strained and lifted throughout as in a trance, and whose body had been rigid and quivering, sank down upon herself and let her eyelids fall, and her head bent forward.
There was complete silence from that moment till the dawn, and the second of the Two Men said to the first that they had had an experience not so much of music as of fire.

DELFT
Delft is the most charming town in the world. It is one of the neat cities: trim, small, packed, self-contained. A good woman in early middle age, careful of her dress, combined, orderly, not without a sober beauty--such a woman on her way to church of a Sunday morning is not more pleasing than Delft. It is on the verge of monotony, yet still individual; in one style, yet suggesting many centuries of activity. There is a full harmony of many colours, yet the memory the place leaves is of a united, warm, and generous tone. Were you suddenly put down in Delft you would know very well that the vast and luxuriant meadows of Holland surrounded it, so much are its air, houses, and habits those of men inspired by the fields.
Delft is very quiet, as befits a town so many of whose streets are ordered lanes of water, yet one is inspired all the while by the voices of children, and the place is strongly alive. Over its sky there follow in stately order the great white clouds of summer, and at evening the haze is lit just barely from below with that transforming level light which is the joy and inspiration of the Netherlands.