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mountain-range in which I had discovered, the previous afternoon, a most
noble face upturned to the sky, and mighty form out stretched, which
I had named Napoleon Dreaming of Universal Empire--and now, this
prodigious face, soft, rich, blue, spirituelle, asleep, tranquil,
reposeful, lay against that giant conflagration of ruddy and golden
splendors all rayed like a wheel with the upstreaming and far-reaching
lances of the sun. It made one want to cry for delight, it was so
supreme in its unimaginable majesty and beauty.
We had a curious experience today. A little after I had sealed and
directed my letter to you, in which I said we should make Avignon before
4, we got lost. We ceased to encounter any village or ruin mentioned
in our "particularizes" and detailed Guide of the Rhone--went drifting
along by the hour in a wholly unknown land and on an uncharted river!
Confound it, we stopped talking and did nothing but stand up in the boat
and search the horizons with the glass and wonder what in the devil had
happened. And at last, away yonder at 5 o'clock when some east towers
and fortresses hove in sight we couldn't recognize them for Avignon--yet
we knew by the broken bridge that it was Avignon.
Then we saw what the trouble was--at some time or other we had drifted
down the wrong side of an island and followed a sluggish branch of the
Rhone not frequented in modern times. We lost an hour and a half by it
and missed one of the most picturesque and gigantic and history-sodden
masses of castellated medieval ruin that Europe can show.
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