From
behind me, on the left, the headland swept down out of a great,
pale-grey, arid height, through a rush of russet and crimson, to the
olive smoke and the water of the level earth. And between, like a blade
of the sky cleaving the earth asunder, went the pale-blue lake, cleaving
mountain from mountain with the triumph of the sky.
Then I noticed that a big, blue-checked cloth was spread on the parapet
before me, over the parapet of heaven. I wondered why it hung there.
Turning round, on the other side of the terrace, under a caper-bush that
hung like a blood-stain from the grey wall above her, stood a little
grey woman whose fingers were busy. Like the grey church, she made me
feel as if I were not in existence. I was wandering by the parapet of
heaven, looking down. But she stood back against the solid wall, under
the caper-bush, unobserved and unobserving. She was like a fragment of
earth, she was a living stone of the terrace, sun-bleached. She took no
notice of me, who was hesitating looking down at the earth beneath. She
stood back under the sun-bleached solid wall, like a stone rolled down
and stayed in a crevice.
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