Suddenly a lugubrious cry overwhelms us! The guardian of the enclosure, at the foot of one of the gates designed like an upright letter which frame the field, sounds on the long Chinese trumpet; and we see the horn of thin brass quiver under the force of the sound which fills it. Raucous and rumbling, if he declines the trumpet toward the earth; and strident if he lifts it; without inflection and without cadences, the dreary blaring noise culminates in the reverberance of a frightful uproar,--do fa, do fa! The harsh call of a peacock would not startle more the drowsiness of this abandoned garden. It is the horn of the shepherd, and not the bugle, which speaks and commands. This is not the singing trumpet which leads armies on,--it is the collective voice of beasts; and the herd or the flocks confusedly assemble at its sound. But we are alone; and for nothing living does the Mongol trumpet at this mysterious crossing of the Ways. When we return to our boat, it is almost night. At sunset, all down the horizon the clouds seem tinted with blue, and on the dim earth the fields of _colzas_ shine like blows of light. THE PINE-TREE In Nature, only the tree is upright as man is, and for a symbolic reason. A man holds himself erect by preserving his balance, and his two arms, hanging at his sides, are no part of his unity. But, though attached to the earth by the collective grasp of its roots, the tree raises itself with an effort; its multifold and divergent parts, spreading out into a fragile and sensitive tissue of leaves, by which it seeks for some support in the very air and light, constitute no mere gesture but the very essential act and condition of its growth. The family of conifers shows a special characteristic. In them I perceive not only a ramification of the trunk into branches, but also their articulation on a stem that rises straight and single,--an articulation which gradually multiplies into threadlike leaves. The fir-tree is typical of such a class, with the symmetrical intersections of its branches, whose essential plan is simply a perpendicular crossed by a graded series of horizontal lines. This type includes many variations in the different regions of the world. The most interesting is that of the pines I studied in Japan. Rather than the rigidity usual to wood, the trunk appears to have a fleshy elasticity. Under the tension on the strong, cylindrical stem of compact fibers, its sheath splits and the rough bark, divided into pentagonal scales,--with deep cracks between them from which resin oozes abundantly,--expands in tough layers. And if, through the suppleness of its jointless body, the trunk yields to the exterior forces which violently assail it or seductively allure it, the tree resists by its inherent energy; and the drama of its pathetic struggle is written in the tormented twisting of its boughs.