He was awakened by the sun, whose pitiless rays, falling perpendicularly upon the granite, caused an intolerable heat. For the Provençal had been foolish enough to lie on the side opposite the shadow cast by the majestic and verdant fronds of the palm-trees. He looked at those solitary trunks, and shuddered. They reminded him of the graceful shafts, crowned with long leaves, for which the columns of the Saracen cathedral at Arles are noted. But when, after counting the palm-trees, he glanced about him, the most ghastly despair settled about his heart. He saw a boundless ocean; the sombre sands of the desert stretched away in every direction as far as the eye could see, and glittered like a steel blade in a bright light. He did not know whether it was a sea of glass or a succession of lakes as smooth as a mirror. Rising in waves, a fiery vapour whirled above that quivering soil. The sky shone with a resplendent Oriental glare, of discouraging purity, for it left nothing for the imagination to desire. Sky and earth were aflame. The silence terrified by its wild and desolate majesty. The infinite, vast expanse weighed upon the soul from every side; not a cloud in the sky, not a breath in the air, not a rift on the surface of the sand, which seemed to move in tiny waves; and the horizon terminated, as at sea in fine weather, with a line of light as slender as the edge of a sword. The Provençal embraced the trunk of a palm-tree as if it were the body of a friend; then, sheltered by the straight, slender shadow which the tree cast upon the stone, he wept, seated himself anew, and remained there, gazing with profound melancholy at the implacable scene before his eyes. He shouted as if to tempt the solitude. His voice, lost in the hollows of the hillock, made in the distance a faint sound which awoke no echo; the echo was in his heart. The Provençal was twenty-two years old; he cocked his carbine. "I shall have time enough for that!" he said to himself, as he placed the weapon on the ground.