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in the desert was condensed in him. Waif of an unknown fate, he
commingled with all the wild secrets of the night. There was in his
mystery a vague reverberation of all enigmas.
About him life seemed sinking to its lowest depths. Certainty and
confidence appeared to diminish in his environs. The shiver of the
brushwood and the grass, a desolate melancholy, an anxiety in which a
conscience seemed to lurk, appropriated with tragic force the whole
landscape to that black figure suspended by the chain. The presence of a
spectre in the horizon is an aggravation of solitude.
He was a Sign. Having unappeasable winds around him, he was implacable.
Perpetual shuddering made him terrible. Fearful to say, he seemed to be
a centre in space, with something immense leaning on him. Who can tell?
Perhaps that equity, half seen and set at defiance, which transcends
human justice. There was in his unburied continuance the vengeance of
men and his own vengeance. He was a testimony in the twilight and the
waste. He was in himself a disquieting substance, since we tremble
before the substance which is the ruined habitation of the soul. For
dead matter to trouble us, it must once have been tenanted by spirit. He
denounced the law of earth to the law of Heaven. Placed there by man, he
there awaited God. Above him floated, blended with all the vague
distortions of the cloud and the wave, boundless dreams of shadow.
Who could tell what sinister mysteries lurked behind this phantom? The
illimitable, circumscribed by naught, nor tree, nor roof, nor passer-by,
was around the dead man. When the unchangeable broods over us--when
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