Sometimes There Would Be A Colonnade Of
Slim, Straight Tree-Stems With The Light Running Down Them As Down
The
Shafts of pillars, that looked as if it ought to lead to
something, and led only to a corner of
Sombre and intricate jungle.
Sometimes a spray of delicate foliage would be thrown out flat, the
light lying flatly along the top of it, so that against a dark
background it seemed almost luminous. There was a great bush over
the thicket (for, indeed, it was more of a thicket than a wood);
and the vague rumours that went among the tree-tops, and the
occasional rustling of big birds or hares among the undergrowth,
had in them a note of almost treacherous stealthiness, that put the
imagination on its guard and made me walk warily on the russet
carpeting of last year's leaves. The spirit of the place seemed to
be all attention; the wood listened as I went, and held its breath
to number my footfalls. One could not help feeling that there
ought to be some reason for this stillness; whether, as the bright
old legend goes, Pan lay somewhere near in siesta, or whether,
perhaps, the heaven was meditating rain, and the first drops would
soon come pattering through the leaves. It was not unpleasant, in
such an humour, to catch sight, ever and anon, of large spaces of
the open plain. This happened only where the path lay much upon
the slope, and there was a flaw in the solid leafy thatch of the
wood at some distance below the level at which I chanced myself to
be walking; then, indeed, little scraps of foreshortened distance,
miniature fields, and Lilliputian houses and hedgerow trees would
appear for a moment in the aperture, and grow larger and smaller,
and change and melt one into another, as I continued to go forward,
and so shift my point of view.
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