am going to fall. Goodbye, little brother.” And the other repeated, with heaving breath: “Not yet, not yet; wait!” Evening came on, quiet evening, its stars reflected in the water. The elder boy, who was fainting, said: “Let go one hand, I want to give you my watch.” He had received it as a present a few days before, and since then it had been the chief care of his heart. He succeeded in getting it, handed it up, and the younger, who was sobbing, placed it on the grass beside him.
It was now completely dark. The two unfortunate creatures were overcome and could scarcely hold out much longer. The bigger boy, feeling that his hour had come, murmured again: “Goodbye, little brother. Kiss papa and mamma.” His paralysed fingers relaxed. He sank and did not come up again. …
The younger, who was left alone, began to cry madly: “Paul! Paul!” but his brother never returned. Then he dashed away, falling over stones, shaken by the most terrible anguish that can wring the heart of a child, and arrived in the drawing room where his parents were waiting. He lost his way again when taking them to the reservoir. He could not find the way. Finally he recognised the place. “It is there; yes, it is there.” The cistern had to be emptied, and the owner would not allow this, as he needed the water for his lemon trees. In the end the two bodies were recovered, but not until the next day.
You see, my dear, that this is just a common newspaper story. But if you had seen the hole, you would have been moved to the bottom of your heart at the thought of this child’s agony, hanging on to his brother’s arm, of this interminable struggle on the part of two children accustomed only to laugh and play, and by that simple little detail: the giving over of the watch. I said to myself: “Fate preserve me from ever receiving such a relic!” I do not know of anything more terrible than the memory that clings to a familiar object that one cannot get rid of. Think that every time he touches this sacred watch, the survivor will see the horrible scene again, the cistern, the wall, the calm water, and the distorted face of his brother, still alive but as surely lost as though he were already dead. During his whole life, at every moment that vision will be there, evoked the moment the tip of his finger touches his watch pocket.
I felt sad until evening. I went off, still going higher, leaving the region of orange trees for the regions of olive trees only, and the latter for the pine-tree region. Then I entered a valley of stones, reaching the ruins of an old castle, built, they say, in the tenth century, by a Saracen chief, a wise man, who got baptised for love of a girl.
Mountains everywhere around me, and in front of me the sea, the sea on which there is a scarcely visible patch: Corsica, or rather the shadow of Corsica.
But on the mountain tops reddened by the setting sun, in the vast heavens, and on the sea, on the whole superb horizon I had come to admire, I saw only two poor children, one lying along the edge of a hole filled with black water, the other sunk up to his neck, held together by their hands, weeping face to face, distracted. And all the time I seemed to hear a feeble voice saying: “Goodbye, little brother. I give you my watch.”
This letter will seem very lugubrious to you, my dear friend. Another time I shall try to be more cheerful.
A Corsican Bandit
The road followed a gentle slope through the middle of the forest of Aïtone. Enormous pines spread out in an arch above our heads, making their sad, continuous, moaning complaint, while to our right and our left the thin straight trunks of the trees formed, as it were, a group of organ-pipes from which the monotonous music of the wind in the treetops seemed to issue.
After a three hours’ tramp there was a clearance in the tangled mass of long reeds: here and there a gigantic umbrella-pine, separated from the rest and looking like a huge sunshade, spread out its dull green canopy; then suddenly we reached the border of the forest some three hundred feet above the gorge that led to the wild valley of Niolo.
A few old, deformed trees seemed to have climbed painfully up the two lofty summits that dominated the pass, like pioneers in advance of the multitude crowding behind. As we turned round we saw the whole of the forest stretching out beneath us like an immense bowl of verdure, the edge of which seemed to touch the sky and was composed of bare rocks that formed a high wall all round.
We started off again and reached the gorge ten minutes later. There I saw an amazing sight. There was a valley beyond another forest, such as I had never seen before: ten miles of petrified solitude hollowed out between two mountains seven thousand feet high, and never a field or a tree to be seen. This was Niolo, the house of Corsican liberty, the inaccessible citadel from which the invader has never been able to eject the mountain-dwellers.
My companion said: “All our bandits take refuge there, too.” We soon reached the bottom of the wild, rugged slit whose beauty no words could express.
Not a blade of grass, not a single plant; granite, nothing but granite. So far as the eye could reach stretched a desert of sparkling granite heated as hot as an oven by the fierce sun that seemed purposely suspended over this gorge of stone. The sight of the crests of the mountains brought one up at a sharp turn, thrilled to the marrow. They looked red and jagged like festoons of coral (for the summits are
