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Updated: June 12, 2025
The floor was covered with a bright, new rag carpet, and there was a horse-hair sofa in the corner, and two or three stiff, round-backed little chairs, the seats also covered with black horse-hair. A thick, gilt-decorated Holy Bible lay in the centre of the marble-top table, shamed now by contact with the crown of his unsaintly hat.
But it did not; on the contrary, the raft proved to be surprisingly buoyant, riding over the great, glassy, round-backed hills of swell as dry as a bone, with a gentle, swaying movement that somehow seemed to soothe my fever-racked frame, so that the condition of semi-delirium that had possessed me just before the felucca foundered passed away and left me sufficiently self-possessed to recognise the necessity for eating and drinking, if I was to survive and get the better of my misfortunes.
Up the valley, the view was cut off by bluff cliffs; whilst down it, the scene was most remarkable: enormous black, round-backed moraines, rose, tier above tier, from a flat lake-bed, apparently hemming in the river between the lofty precipices on the east flank of the valley. The slope from the top of Mont Blanc to the Chamouni valley is 2464 feet per mile, or 1 in 2.1.
But a long distance would still have to be traversed, and his eyes wandered over the outlines of the round-backed hills divided by steep valleys, so much alike that he asked himself how it was that Jesus could distinguish one from the other; but his guide seemed to divine the way as by instinct, and Paul struggled on, encouraged by a promise of a half-hour's rest as soon as they reached the summit of the hill before them.
It was not difficult to guess that the majority of the group were men bred among the great, sweeping, round-backed hills of the Scottish Border from "up the watters" in Selkirk or Peeblesshires, some of them, others again perhaps from Liddesdale, Eskdale, or Annandale, or one of the many dales famous in Border history; you could hear it in their tongue.
As the latter advanced toward Wyant, the young man was conscious of staring with unseemly intentness at his small round-backed figure, dressed with shabby disorder and surmounted by a wonderful head, lean, vulpine, eagle-beaked as that of some art-loving despot of the Renaissance: a head combining the venerable hair and large prominent eyes of the humanist with the greedy profile of the adventurer.
On each she cried over her lessons, and was cross at whatever the boys said to her, made a fuss about keeping the ornamental cases of the bon-bons, and went about round-backed, peevish, and discontented, finding everything flat and ugly after her one peep at the luxuries of the Park. Her farthings melted away fast; but she seemed to think this her misfortune, not her fault.
To the puzzled conservatism of the abiding huge majority nearest to the soil the round-backed, lumpish men who tie strings round their corduroys under the knee, and the strong, cow-faced women who look at passers-by on the road from the doors of dark little cottages, over radiant patches of blossoming garden it seemed safest to drop family names altogether, and call it merely the Court.
Down below it stretched, dimly geometrical in the darkness, picked out at regular intervals by glow-worm spangles of light. One black gap in the long line of grey, round-backed airships marked the position from which the Vaterland had come. Beside it a second monster now rose softly, released from its bonds and cables into the air.
The fish caught were the yellow perch, which are not esteemed for eating; the white perch, a beautiful, silvery, round-backed fish, which bites eagerly, runs about with the line while being pulled up, makes good sport for the angler, and an admirable dish; a great chub; and three horned pouts, which swallow the hook into their lowest entrails.
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