The Cathedral | Page 3

the sky.
The train toiled up, snorting and turning round and round like a top;
then, going into a tunnel, was swallowed by the earth; it seemed to be
pushing the light of day away in front, till it suddenly came out into a
clearing full of sunshine; presently, as if it were retracing its road, it
rushed into another burrow, and emerged with the strident yell of a
steam whistle and deafening clatter of wheels, to fly up the winding
ribbon of road cut in the living rock.
Suddenly the peaks parted, a wide opening brought the train out into
broad daylight; the scene lay clear before them, terrible on all sides.
"Le Drac!" exclaimed the Abbé Gévresin, pointing to a sort of liquid
serpent at the bottom of the precipice, writhing and tossing between
rocks in the very jaws of the pit.
For now and again the reptile flung itself up on points of stone that rent
it as it passed; the waters changed as though poisoned by these fangs;
they lost their steely hue, and whitened with foam like a bran bath; then
the Drac hurried on faster, faster, flinging itself into the shadowy gorge;
lingered again on gravelly reaches, wallowing in the sun; presently it
gathered up its scattered rivulets and went on its way, scaly with scum
like the iridescent dross on boiling lead, till, far away, the rippling rings
spread and vanished, skinned and leaving behind them on the banks a
white granulated cuticle of pebbles, a hide of dry sand.
Durtal, as he leaned out of the carriage window, looked straight down
into the gulf; on this narrow way with only one line of rails, the train on
one side was close to the towering hewn rock, and on the other was the
void. Great God! if it should run off the rails! "What a hash!" thought
he.

And what was not less overwhelming than the appalling depth of the
abyss was, as he looked up, the sight of the furious, frenzied assault of
the peaks. Thus, in that carriage, he was literally between the earth and
sky, and the ground over which it was moving was invisible, being
covered for its whole width by the body of the train.
On they went, suspended in mid-air at a giddy height, along
interminable balconies without parapets; and below, the cliffs dropped
avalanche-like, fell straight, bare, without a patch of vegetation or a
tree. In places they looked as if they had been split down by the blows
of an axe--huge growths of petrified wood; in others they seemed sawn
through shaley layers of slate.
And all round lay a wide amphitheatre of endless mountains, hiding the
heavens, piled one above another, barring the way to the travelling
clouds, stopping the onward march of the sky.
Some made a good show with their jagged grey crests, huge masses of
oyster shells; others, with scorched summits, like burnt pyramids of
coke, were green half-way up. These bristled with pine woods to the
very edge of the precipices, and they were scarred too with white
crosses--the high roads, dotted in places with Nuremberg dogs,
red-roofed hamlets, sheepfolds that seemed on the verge of tumbling
headlong, clinging on--how, it was impossible to guess, and flung here
and there on patches of green carpet glued on to the steep hill-sides;
while other peaks towered higher still, like vast calcined hay-cocks,
with doubtfully dead craters still brooding internal fires, and trailing
smoky clouds which, as they blew off, really seemed to be coming out
of their summits.
The landscape was ominous; the sight of it was strangely discomfiting;
perhaps because it impugned the sense of the infinite that lurks within
us. The firmament was no more than a detail, cast aside like needless
rubbish on the desert peaks of the hills. The abyss was the all-important
fact; it made the sky look small and trivial, substituting the
magnificence of its depths for the grandeur of eternal space.
The eye, in fact, turned away with disappointment from the sky, which

had lost its infinitude of depth, its immeasurable breadth, for the
mountains seemed to touch it, pierce it, and uphold it; they cut it up,
sawing it with the jagged teeth of their pinnacles, showing mere
tattered skirts of blue and rags of cloud.
The eye was involuntarily attracted to the ravines, and the head swam
at the sight of those, vast pits of blackness. This immensity in the
wrong place, stolen from above and cast into the depths, was horrible.
The Abbé had said that the Drac was one of the most formidable
torrents in France; at the moment it was dormant, almost dry; but when
the season of snows and storms comes it wakes up and flashes like a
tide of