by ADRIEN LE CORBEAU Translated from the French by J. H. ROSS Jonathan Cape ELEVEN GOWER STREET LONDON FIRST PUBLISHED IN MCMXXIV MADE & PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY BUTLER & TANNER LTD. FROME AND LONDON Contents CHAP.   1   THE ODYSSEY   2   THE GENUS TREMBLES INTO CONSCIOUSNESS   3   THE KINDLY DARKNESS   4   CONTRASTS WHICH ARE NOT CONTRASTS   5   CAUGHT UP INTO THE STREAM OF LIFE   6   THE LAW OF BALANCE   7   METAMORPHOSES   8   WHAT THE MOON SAW   9   WHEN THE CORSELET SNAPS

For years on end it had been rolling, across the plains, through the deep meadow grasses, under the dim echoing archways of the forest. Always, in heat and cold, beneath blue skies, or skies clouded with rain and hail and snow, it had been rolling ceaselessly. One day it would be gilded by the sunlight—but not softened; another day grizzled streaks of rain soaked it—without refreshment. It was buried, to all appearances for ever, by drifts of snow—but was not hurt. It had crossed cataracts of li

One day the stream of water by which the seed was carried along sank suddenly—whirling down a funnel in the ground. Slowly the grey light of day grew less as the seed dived deeper and deeper, till in absolute darkness it was rushing madly down the water-spout. Hoarse bellowings resounded about its long subterranean voyage, asserting themselves above the stifled noises of the passage of the buried river through the bowels of the earth. For weeks and months the pine-kernel revolved in these invisi

Buried between two layers of soil the little pine-kernel woke from its inactivity. Underground was warm and moist; and therefore the seed swelled up with comfort, and relaxed itself with pleasure. The damp crept through it, right through it, with a gentle persistence in marked contrast with the brutal attack of the flood which had swept it away but had not broken down its stubborn defence. The heat of the subsoil made the seed ferment, and summoned it to live; but the mysterious centre of life i

On the earth it was spring: and the excitement of it drove underground. Our sprouting seed was caught up in this frenzy of living, expanded itself, and pushed downwards and upwards in a double movement, under cover of that odd buckler, the pileorhiza. The light attracted it; but at the same time it plunged deeper into the night, for there it found hidden sympathies, and encouragements which made it fierce and greedy. It grew enormously, draining to itself the scattered nourishment about it. If o

In the summer when the sky was blue and the air diaphanous, in autumn with its melancholy mist, in winter when the wind blew cold and clean and sharp, our tree lived on and prospered with the passing years. For now it had become a tree, a giant sequoia pine. It stood a little clear of a forest in an open space, and so looked solitary. Its head towered over the surrounding country from its place in the blue and green opalescent gulf of heaven. The forest whose leaves danced tremblingly before its

How lustreless and same the passage of time appears when we review it in our memory! but how uncertain and varied it is when we live it moment by moment, leaning out of each second to encounter the next! Likewise with the life of the great tree. Its sap on the daily round of work may have had fresh pleasures and discomforts at each revolution; but the tree's life seemed to have slipped past in a tame monotony when taken in a period of thirty or forty centuries. Yet it may be that the sequoia fel

As space creates all things out of its own substance only to devour them again at last, so time which itself cannot move or change allots to everything its span of life. Our hours and days are within us, and it is the revolution of the globe, and not time, which makes the seasons. Yet beings and things succeed one another, and their courses give us an illusion that the age grows old. It is a convenient figure, for it is good to say that the days slip past and the seasons wheel round, each in tur

Meanwhile there were showering down on earth the beams of that moon, mirror and transmitter of the sun, which conveys to us its light without its heat. From the distance came the splashing of water: and on the river bank, where it was nearest to the tree and within sight, lay a man and woman. They were naked, and the water was dripping slowly from their bronzed bodies. They lay aside by side, and the low murmur of their voices and their stifled kisses filled the near air about. Beyond and around

More pine kernels had sprouted near by, and the great tree was now kept company by other russet trunks, tens of centuries younger, but undergoing the same development. They grew and changed against the same background as the older tree, extracting the nourishment which formed their shape and colour, sap and scent, from the same area. Again the law of perpetuity asserted itself in creation. Near the giant a young tree was fainting and failing. It had not the strong straight shape of the other con

The giant tree seemed almost to slumber in the still hazy light of that autumnal afternoon. The sap appeared dispirited, weighed down from tree-top to root by weariness. For some hundreds of years it had not been working at full pitch. The time-worn trunk bristled with dried lifeless branches in whose veins sap had ceased to flow with life-giving effect: and in the covering of needles outside the pine could be seen definite signs of age, even to the extent of sorry bare patches. Its life had now

Time then is not to be divided into centuries and hours and minutes: but just as each atom figures a world in itself, so each moment is an eternity, one link in an endless chain which binds the remotest past to the remotest future. Time's mirror may look with changeless face upon the tens of thousands of events which defile before it and pass away leaving no mark;—but that is not to say that these events are without issue, since their consequences ripple out into space for ever and ever. What ha

Whilst the August sun was pouring its clear warm rays from the blue heavens upon the world, a fine wood-powder continued to rain down from all the internal cavities of the giant's trunk, in a reddish dust which lay deep upon the roots. The tree's substance had been so falling away for centuries, with every now and then a larger dilapidation when some great cavity formed itself within its thickness: while on the outside the harsh bark as slowly decayed. Beneath the soil in the still-kindly darkne

The forest giant now lay low in the sunlight waiting the return of its substances to their kindred elements of time or space. For the moment the tree was dead, since it kept yet its living shape; but when nothing of it remained recognizable, it would be as if it had never been. Long and short lives, rich and poor lives, are all made equal at the moment when they have ended. Like the mass of beings and plants and things, our tree found rest in death. After so many and with so many we ask anxiousl

What can chaos be but the mass of elements not yet conjoined with those other atoms which have been embodied and which have returned to the mass? The fallen tree was now sunken in an endless sleep. The rays of the sun playing over its ruined trunk gradually absorbed its colours. The discoloured redness of its substance, the yellow of its rotted dust, the fresh green of its last shoots slowly faded, while the winds took away its antique smell and the blue atmosphere re-incorporated the oxygen, th

Through all the changing pomp of seasons, while the sun showered down its yellow rays, while the rain striped it with grey markings, and the snow lay heavy and white upon it, the vision of the tree was present to me, first as a colossal column, standing up in heaven, then as a broken ruin, prostrate on the ground. As through a light haze I have tried to distinguish the splendour of its life, and the tragedy of its death: and all this while the blue and green and grey country in which the sequoia