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The long months which intervened between the annual apparition of Camors at Reuilly, filled up by Madame de Tecle with a single idea and by the sweet monotony of a regular life, passed more rapidly than the Count could have imagined. His own life, so active and so occupied, placed ages and abysses between each of his periodical voyages.
Then my tears began to flow, but no one perceived them; and as I wept the violin continued to fill the silence with its sad wailing, and it seemed to get a response from bottomless abysses inhabited by phantoms to which I could give neither a form nor name. I wish now to speak of the anguish caused by a story that was read to me.
He knew not; the journey among those countless columns, past those armies of petrified gods, down lanes of flickering lights, seemed longer than the voyage of a caravan, longer than his pilgrimage to China! But suddenly, inexplicably, there came a silence as of cemeteries; the living ocean seemed to have ebbed away from about him, to have been engulfed within abysses of subterranean architecture!
Over the sea the clouds were hurrying towards the land as ever and anon they rent themselves into strips, and revealed fathomless abysses of blue wherein the autumn sun burned uneasily, and sent cloud-shadows gliding over the puckered waste of waters, until, the shore reached, the wind further harried the masses of vapour towards the sharp flanks of the mountains, and, after drawing them up and down the slopes, relegated them to clefts, and left them steaming there.
Such depths, such solemn vastness, such gulfs and abysses of architectural space, the rich, mellow light, the haze outside becoming a mysterious, hallowing presence within, quite mastered me, and I sat down upon a seat, feeling my first genuine cathedral intoxication.
True, that some vague tradition that the mountain once gave forth fire hovered around its borders; and several ancient writers, amongst them Diodorus Siculus and Strabo, inferred from the appearances of the higher parts of the mountain and the character of the rocks, which were "cindery and as if eaten by fire," that the country was once in a burning state, "being full of fiery abysses, though now extinct from want of fuel."
Sudden catastrophes, the dreadful alternations forced upon the shuddering fragile ship, tossed like a toy by the wild breath of the tempest; the blood of the battle-field, with the gloomy smoke of artillery; the horrible charnel-house into which our own habitation is converted by a contagious plague; conflagrations which wrap whole cities in their glittering flames; fathomless abysses which open at our feet; remove us less sensibly from all the fleeting attachments "which pass, which can be broken, which cease," than the prolonged view of a soul conscious of its own position, silently contemplating the multiform aspects of time and the mute door of eternity!
I had been altogether at fault, and I was taught, what I have since been taught, over and over again, that unknown abysses, into which the sun never shines, lie covered with commonplace in men and women, and are revealed only by the rarest opportunity. But my thoughts turned almost immediately to myself, and I could bring myself to no resolve.
"Vulpes," I answered. "Ah! yes Vulpes. I promenade myself to the house of Madame Vulpes." "The spirit medium?" "Yes, the great medium. Great heavens! what a woman! I write on a slip of paper many of questions concerning affairs of the most secret affairs that conceal themselves in the abysses of my heart the most profound; and behold, by example, what occurs?
That great national marvel, the Mammoth Cave, was visited, which, next to Niagara, the wonderland of the Yellowstone Park, and the grand scenic beauty of the Yosemite Valley, is the greatest curiosity of this country. The vast interior, with its domes, abysses, grottoes, rivers, and cataracts profitably entertain the visitor for hours.
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