The Ebony Tower/Eliduc/The Enigma [antikvár]

. . . Et par forez longues et lees Par leus estranges et sauvages Et passa mainz felons passciges Et maint peril et maint destroit Tant qu'il vint au santier tot droit. —GHRÉTIEN DE TROYES, YVAIN* Dávid arrived at Coétminais* the afteroon after the one he had landed at Cherbourg* and driven down to Avranches,* where he had spent the intervening Tuesday night. That had allowed an enjoyable meander over the remaining distance; a distant view of the spectacular spired dream of Mont-Saint-Michel,* strolls around Saint-Malo* and Dinan/* then south in the splendid Sep-tember weather and through the new countryside. He took at once to the quiet landscapes, orcharded and harvested, precise and pollarded, self-concentrated, exhaling a spent fertility. Twice he stopped and noted down particularly pleasing conjunctions of tone and depth—parallel stripes of watercolour with penciled notes of amplification in his neat hand. Though there was somé indication of the formai origin in these verbal notes—that a stripe of colour was associated with a field, a sunlit wall, a distant hill—he drew nothing. He alsó wrote down the date, the time of day and the weather, before he drove on. He felt a little guilty to be enjoying himself so much, to be here so unexpectedly alone, without Beth, and after he had made such a fuss; but the day, the sense of discovery, and of course the object of the whole exercise looming formidably and yet agreeably just ahead, everything conspired to give a pleasant illusion of bachelor freedom. Then the final few miles through the forest of Paim-pont,* one of the last large remnants of the old wooded Brittany,* were deliciously right: green and shaded minor roads, with occa-sional sunshot vistas down the narrow rides eut through the end-less trees. Things about the old man's most recent and celebrated period feli into plaee at once. No amount of reading and intel-ligent deduction could supplant the direct experience. Well before he arrived, Dávid knew he had not wasted his journey. 8—1762 33