With my hands under my neck and my nose in the air, my eyes flit across
the sky. High up above the peaks of Tore, a clustering mist sways in slow
rhythm, breaks apart and presses close again, fluctuates and strains to
give birth to something. But when I rise to walk on, the end is not yet in
sight.

I meet a line of ants, a procession of ants, busy travelers. They neither
toil nor carry anything; they simply move. I retrace my steps to see if I
can find their leader, but it is useless: farther and farther I retreat, I
begin to run, but the procession is endless before and behind me. Perhaps
they started a week ago. So I go on my way, and the other insects go on
theirs.

Surely this is not a mountainside I walk on; this is a bosom, an embrace,
in its softness. I tread gently, for I do not wish to stamp or weigh it
down, and I marvel: a mountain so tender and defenseless, indulgent like a
mother. To think of an ant walking on this! Here and there lie stones,
half-covered with moss, not because they have fallen there, but because
this is their home, and they have lived here long. This is peerless.

When I reach the top and look back, it is high noon. Far away on another
peak walks one of the cows of the cotters, a strange little cow with red
and white flanks. A crow sits on a high cliff above me and caws down at me
in a voice like an iron rasp scraping against the stone. A warm thrill
runs through me, and I feel, as I have done in the woods so many times
before, that someone has just been here, and has stepped to one side.
Someone is with me here, and a moment later I see his back disappearing
into the woods. "It is God," I think. There I stand, neither speaking nor
singing. I only see. I feel all my face being filled with the sight. "It
was God," I think.