Urien's Voyage by André Gide Read Free Book Online

terrifying doubts about her identity.
    While the others were getting back into the boat that evening, Ydier, Nathanaël and I, feeling vaguely once more a desire to live, started inland. Then we had a strange adventure whose mysteriousness still torments us, for it was unique and unrelated to anything else that occurred during our voyage.
    Night had fallen; the wind swept across the rushes in the moors; fires hovered over the peat-bogs; afraid of the quagmires, we walked slowly. A tinkling sound broke the silence and caused us to stop, surprised. Like a vaporous form, a white woman emerged, floated ethereally, rose above the marsh; she shook a chalice-like bell which she held in her hand. Our first impulse was to flee; then, somewhat reassured by her ethereality, we were about to call out to her when she began to disintegrate into shapeless mist, either higher or more distant, and the tinkling sound began to fade away; but it lingered still, and we were beginning to think that fatigue had made us the victims of some illusion when, walking onward, we heard it nearer, again clear, skimming the ground, at times uncertain, alternately blatant and hesitant, then plaintive, imploring; bending down in the darkness for a better view, we found a poor lamb lost on the moor, bewildered, its wool dampened by the dark. Around its neck was the little bell. We lifted up the lamb that had gone astray and removed its bell.
    But once again a noise broke the stillness and slowly there emerged from the slough a woman who wore a veil resembling a mortuary shroud, her gray veil clung like mist to the rush-bed. The drooping lily inclined its chalice earthward; its sounds spilled out like seeds. And, as she fled, I saw her stoop down near a recess in the darkness and hang her lily like a bell from the neck of a waiting lamb. We found the lamb on the plain.
    A third form appeared; sweat covered her face; behind her floated her train, like a tattered cloth, over the leaves of the rushes. And I saw her hold out the lily as she disintegrated and leave the disconsolate lamb with the bell which her dissolving hand had tied to its wool.
    In the same way twelve women appeared; we found the lambs afterwards and, like shepherds without crooks, used our hands to guide the flock through the night along unknown paths, between clumps of rushes and off-shoots of ranunculuses.
    When we returned to the boat, dawn was beginning to glow. Ellis was in some pain and slightly delirious. I noticed that day, for the first time I think, that her hair was completely blond; blond, nothing more.
    The felucca began once more to move up the fluvial waters; long days passed in this way, but they were too monotonous to relate. The banks were always so alike that we seemed not to be making any headway. The stream slowed imperceptibly, stopped, and we rowed through stagnant water, deep and dark. On each bank stood a row of cypresses; from each branch there fell a somber shadow that weighed heavily on our souls. We heard our oars fall into the stream with a muffled rhythm, then the water lifted up by the oars fall back like heavy tears; we heard nothing else. Leaning over the water, each saw his face enlarged and enveloped by darkness for, because of the cypresses which had become gigantic, the water no longer reflected the sky. We looked often at the black water and often at our faces in the water. Ellis babbled incoherently in the bottom of the boat and uttered prophecies. We understand that we had come to the climactic point of our history. And soon, in fact, the gigantic cypresses grew smaller. But we were too overcome by silence and by darkness to be very astounded by a disconcerting phenomenon: the water was beginning to flow, but to flow in the opposite direction. Now we were going back down the mysterious stream. And as in a story read backwards, or as in a flashback, we were retracing our voyage; we came back to the familiar steep banks and again lived through all our