whiteness of the land. Nearer, a woman's red _haick_ interposes, the single
stain of bright colour breaking the indefinite brown and grey of the plain.
Here is felt the harshness of Numidia; it is almost the stark spaces of
the desert world. But on the side towards the east, the architecture of
mountains, wildly sculptured, stands against the level reaches of the
horizon. Upon the clear background of the sky, shew, distinctly, lateral
spurs and a cone like to the mystic representation of Tanit. Towards the
south, crumbling isolated crags appear, scattered about like gigantic
pedestals uncrowned of their statues, or like the pipes of an organ raised
there to capture and attune the cry of the great winds of the _steppe_.

This country is characterized by a different kind of energy from Thagaste.
There is more air and light and space. If the plantation is sparse, the
beautiful shape of the land may be observed all the better. Nothing breaks
or lessens the grand effects of the light.... And let no one say that
Augustin's eyes cared not for all that, he who wrote after his conversion,
and in all the austerity of his repentance: "If sentient things had not a
soul, we should not love them so much."

It is here, between Madaura and Thagaste, during the eager years of youth,
that he gathered together the seeds of sensations and images which,
later on, were to burst forth into fiery and boiling metaphors in the
_Confessions_, and in his homilies and paraphrases of Holy Scripture. Later
on, he will not have the time to observe, or he will have lost the power.
Rhetoric will stretch its commonplace veil between him and the unceasing
springtide of the earth. Ambition will turn him away from those sights
which reveal themselves only to hearts unselfish and indifferent. Then,
later on, Faith will seize hold of him to the exclusion of all else. He
will no longer perceive the creation save at odd moments in a kind of
metaphysical dream, and, so to speak, across the glory of the Creator.