Europe itself only begins beyond the frontier. The gates, even on the French side, seem to assume a peculiar character, and in spite of the presence of the customs officials, to have something foreign about them. For an instant the dotted frontier line seems to rise like a drawbridge, and Mentone-Garavan appears in its blue setting with its customs officials smoking at the latticed window of their palm-leaf hut; check trousers are drying on the bougainvilliers, and a commemorative tablet shows that at this point France dates from 1861. A bubbling brook scurries through a gap in the rock pierced by those caves in which primeval man sleeps amongst flints and fossil teeth. At Modane, through which Lewis passed forty-eight hours earlier, the frontier consists of a cold corridor of wet stones suspended over a bronze-coloured torrent with ferns that brush the windows of the passing carriages. Two languages with but a single rail. Frasne-Vallorbe, where begins the land of icy water, black pine trees and cheerless plains, which runs like a sash across the whole of Europe. At Kehl, that bridge which is such a feat of German toil, like an Eiffel Tower flung hurriedly across the Rhine. Jeumont, Feignies, the outlets into Belgium, where during the night the customs' searchlights play amongst the slag heaps lining the pitiless canals like limelight following an actress off the stage. To say nothing of the openings into Spain: Portbou and its Vauban forts, like huge neglected roses, given over to traffic in barrels of sweets medicinal wines; Béhobie with the sound of Spanish klaxons ascending along the Pyrenean torrents. Hendaye and the international bridge where the Guardia Civil hands over extradited people to the French police. Lewis might have left France and won his freedom in almost any direction with his eyes shut. VIII "_Ma présentation, en cette tenue de maraudeur aquatique, je la peux tenter, avec l'excuse du hasard._" (S. MALLARMÉ, _Le Nénuphar blanc_.) THE hotel, if one could dignify by this term the old convent where cockroaches followed one another across the tiled floors like a stencilled pattern, was full of the tragedies of such places in the South; sheets too short (the top one being sewn to the blanket), granite bolsters (from which one wakes with pulverised ears), a permanent odour of disinfectant, candlelit nights on which the tall shadows of the bug-hunters dance across the rough plaster walls, holes in the mosquito curtains through which the mosquitoes crawl, and, pervading everything, the sickly smell of night-light oil.