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Updated: May 11, 2025
There were many roofless cottages standing here and there in the wide clearings. There were bleak bogs of the light colored kind that produce a very worthless turf, that makes poor fuel. At one of the way stations, a decent-looking woman came into the compartment where I sat. Divining at once that I had crossed the water, she spoke pretty freely. Their farm was on a mountain side.
The rich plain passed, we reach the slopes of the Pyrenees, their wooded sides presenting a strange, even grotesque, appearance, owing to the mathematical regularity with which the woods are cut, portions being close shaven, others left intact in close juxtaposition, solid phalanxes of trees and clearings at right angles.
The edge of the forest is not far distant to the right, and all the way along it there have been clearings made and maize planted. They occurred, as it were, in columns. The air would be comparatively clear of them for a few hundred yards, then we would pass through a band perhaps fifty yards in width, where hundreds were always in sight, and all travelling one way.
Besides this, the vegetable mould is, even under the most favorable circumstances, slow in parting with the humidity it has accumulated under the protection of the woods, and the infiltration from neighboring forests contributes to keep the soil of small clearings too wet for the advantageous cultivation of artificial crops.
From houses that lurked invisible in clearings suddenly burst forth a population, an audience ardent with patriotism, eager for politics even from a Cockney interpreter, and numerous enough to stir electricity in a speaker's mind.
All around them the forests, the clearings, the river, covered by the silent veil of night, seemed to wake up and listen to her words in attentive stillness.
These roosted by night in a large butternut tree in front of Tom's house in the very top of it, and by day they wandered about the edges of the clearings in quest of beech-nuts, which were very plentiful that fall.
We had a wild road over hills, covered with pine forests, through the breaks in which we now and then caught a glimpse of a long lake to the westward, shining with a steel-blue gleam in the morning sun. There were but few clearings along the road, and miles frequently intervened without a sign of human habitation.
And he would remain to this day a figure out of the Thousand and One Nights, were it not that in the decline of his glory we see him as a grandiose image of the mournfulness of life, the vanity of joy, the nothingness of man. His old age was melancholy. Exhausted and governed by women, he denied God and sacrificed to idols. We discern in him wide gaps, vast clearings in the soul.
After leaving the town we went along a good road for some distance, with cottages and clearings on either side, until we came to a pepper and gambir plantation. The two crops are cultivated together, and both are grown on the edge of the jungle, for the sake of the wood, which is burned in the preparation of the gambir.
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