Free The Chateau d'Argol by Julien Gracq Page B

far from the heat of the sun, wandered desperately under the grey cope of the sky, and, here and there, one could see in their own hideous shred of light, as in the faint light of a beacon, the icy glint of the waters of a spring, the greyish mud of an inexplicable path that could only lead to the horrible and vacuous waste-countries of the rain.
    It now seemed ever more certain to Albert that the improvisation which Herminien had given voice to in the chapel and whose echoes kept ceaselessly resounding in his memory, had less the value of a caprice of his sensibility troubled by that strange pilgrimage, than of an act and an appeal—and that Herminien had sought in the soothing balm of music, not so much an appeasement of his sufferings, as a protection against an ineluctable temptation. Albert found in his own heart the proof that interests other than those of a passing and purely aesthetic emotion had been weighing in the balance, when he remembered the anxiety which had gripped it in the chapel, that anxiety whose indefinite nature, whose surprising character of a warning, could only be ascribed to some precarious struggle in which the forces of life and death themselves were at stake. And so it was that when the deathly rays of the sun reappeared, throwing wide open for them the forest's snares once more, he had the overwhelming feeling that the days of the end were now at hand.
    On an afternoon of crushing heat which seemed by its intensity to bleach all the blue out of the sky, as colour from some airy fabric, Albert sat in the tower room overlooking the high terraces. He gazed at the woods of Storrvan, at all that austere landscape, and suddenly it seemed to him that the sea of trees flowing without a break to the horizon was completely detached from the world, separated by the malediction of a magic spell, and that it had begun to turn around the castle like a wheel whose movement nothing could stop, and as terrifying as the apparently slow motion, inappreciable and as it were secondary , of the blades of a propeller turning at its very maximum speed. And, in truth, he was convinced that this world surrounding him was sustained in its ghostly fixity only by the tension, now approaching its limit, of some unimaginable force that, by a miracle, kept it from dissolution, and that all these fragile phenomena whose very passivity constituted the real terror for the soul, must perforce be shattered and fly to pieces before his eyes at the slightest loss of speed.
    In the midst of this frenzy which his reason could only with difficulty control, he glanced down and saw Herminien and Heide leave the castle and disappear into the forest. Their erect shadows ran rapidly along the ground, and Albert's eye caught sight of the long barrel of a rifle slung over Herminien's shoulder, which he followed for a long time as it glinted cruelly through the curtain of forest trees, appearing and disappearing at intervals with the unendurable gleam of a naked sword.
    Little by little, Albert slipped into a profound reverie in which the flash of that hostile steel in the midst of exhausting and equivocal meditations, seemed to reappear at long intervals like those luminous streaks left on the retina by a too dazzling light, emerging finally as a dominant motif and, in the midst of dim and indistinct images, invariably accompanied by an indefinable sensation of an impending danger. And below this obsessive recurrence, deep in his memory, some obscure travail seemed to be going on, without his mind, prostrate and totally inert, lending the least participation. In the mass of his memories, slight and almost molecular detachments and displacements seemed to be taking place under the pressure of a prodigious weight, and, like iron filings moved by an invisible magnet on a piece of paper, seemed to shape themselves, did finally shape themselves, into what now appeared to be an interpretable figure , but which his feverish reason, struck with a