the sea, and causes the tops of cliffs to resemble green cloth. Under
the gibbet, on the very spot over which hung the feet of the executed
criminal, was a long and thick tuft, uncommon on such poor soil.
Corpses, crumbling there for centuries past, accounted for the beauty of
the grass. Earth feeds on man.

A dreary fascination held the child; he remained there open-mouthed. He
only dropped his head a moment when a nettle, which felt like an insect,
stung his leg; then he looked up again--he looked above him at the face
which looked down on him. It appeared to regard him the more steadfastly
because it had no eyes. It was a comprehensive glance, having an
indescribable fixedness in which there were both light and darkness, and
which emanated from the skull and teeth, as well as the empty arches of
the brow. The whole head of a dead man seems to have vision, and this is
awful. No eyeball, yet we feel that we are looked at. A horror of worms.

Little by little the child himself was becoming an object of terror. He
no longer moved. Torpor was coming over him. He did not perceive that he
was losing consciousness--he was becoming benumbed and lifeless. Winter
was silently delivering him over to night. There is something of the
traitor in winter. The child was all but a statue. The coldness of stone
was penetrating his bones; darkness, that reptile, was crawling over
him. The drowsiness resulting from snow creeps over a man like a dim
tide. The child was being slowly invaded by a stagnation resembling that
of the corpse. He was falling asleep.

On the hand of sleep is the finger of death. The child felt himself
seized by that hand. He was on the point of falling under the gibbet. He
no longer knew whether he was standing upright.