Moving throughout its length, trembling from bank to bank with sampans and with boats; where the guests, clothed in silk like vivid bouquets, drink and enjoy themselves; all is light and the sound of drums. From here, from there, from everywhere, pirogues with dragons’ heads appear and defile, propelled by the arms of an hundred naked paddlers, who move to the delirious rhythm of this large yellow man in the midst, as with both hands he beats out a demoniac march. How close together they seem,--in one wave, the very spirit of the current! How active this crowd of bodies, plunged to the waist! On the bank where I embark a woman is washing her linen. The bowl of vermilion lacquer into which piles the clothing has a border of gold that shines and glows in the sun of this festival. Brute glance of reflected brightness; symbolic eye of this day of the honorable River! THE GOLDEN HOUR Of all the year this is the most golden hour! As the farmer at the end of the season realizes the fruits of his labors and receives their price, so the season comes in a gold to which all is transmuted, in the sky and on the earth. I wander through the lanes of the harvest, up to the neck in gold; I rest my chin on the table of the field which flashes in the sunlight to its farthest boundary. Going toward the mountains, I surmount a sea of grain. Between the banks of harvest, the immense, dry flame of the morning-colored plain, where is the old dim earth? Water is changed into wine; oranges gleam in the silent branches. All is ripe; grain and straw, and the fruit with the leaf. It is indeed golden. All is finished, and I see that all is true. In the fervent effort of the year all color has evaporated. Suddenly, to my eyes, the earth is like a sun. Let me not die before the golden hour! DISSOLUTION Again I am carried back over the indifferent liquid sea. When I am dead, nothing can hurt me. When I shall be interred between my father and mother, nothing will make me suffer more. They cannot jeer any longer at this too ardent heart. The sacrament of my body will dissolve in the interior of the earth; but, like a most piercing cry, my soul will repose in the bosom of Abraham. Now everything is dissolved, and with a dull and heavy eye I search about me in vain for the familiar land and the firm road under my feet,--and for that unkind face! The sky is nothing but fog, and Space is nothing but water! You see it! Everything is blurred; and all about me I must search in vain for line or form. For a horizon there is nothing but the cessation of color in darkness. All matter is resolved into water alone, like the tears I feel coursing down my cheeks. All sound is like the murmur of sleep when it breathes to us all that is most crushing to our hopes. I shall have searched in vain, I shall find nothing more beyond me--neither that country which might have been my home, nor that well-loved face!