tideless sea, you will find the natives still telling a strange
story about a saint of the Dark Ages. There, on the twilight
border of the Dark Continent, you feel the Dark Ages. I have
only visited the place once, though it lies, so to speak,
opposite to the Italian city where I lived for years, and yet you
would hardly believe how the topsy-turvydom and transmigration
of this myth somehow seemed less mad than they really are,
with the wood loud with lions at night and that dark red
solitude beyond. They say that the hermit St. Securis,
living there among trees, grew to love them like companions;
since, though great giants with many arms like Briareus,
they were the mildest and most blameless of the creatures;
they did not devour like the lions, but rather opened their
arms to all the little birds. And he prayed that they might
be loosened from time to time to walk like other things.
And the trees were moved upon the prayers of Securis,
as they were at the songs of Orpheus. The men of the desert
were stricken from afar with fear, seeing the saint walking
with a walking grove, like a schoolmaster with his boys.
For the trees were thus freed under strict conditions of discipline.
They were to return at the sound of the hermit's bell, and, above all,
to copy the wild beasts in walking only to destroy and devour nothing.
Well, it is said that one of the trees heard a voice that was
not the saint's; that in the warm green twilight of one summer
evening it became conscious of some thing sitting and speaking
in its branches in the guise of a great bird, and it was that
which once spoke from a tree in the guise of a great serpent.
As the voice grew louder among its murmuring leaves the tree
was torn with a great desire to stretch out and snatch at
the birds that flew harmlessly about their nests, and pluck