distance, and he muttered: 'There are Anfos and
Loup — I must find them/ But now even their names
seemed a long way away, almost as far away as their
voices.
He realized that his head was aching, that indeed
his whole body felt vaguely uneasy, and since he was
a stranger to physical ills he pressed his hands to his
throbbing head with a gesture half of fear, half of
resentment. Yet even as he did so he became aware
of a very great joy that surged up within him^ of an
indescribable sense of peace that far exceeded his
apprehension; and his mind must abandon itself to
this peace, fearlessly, trustfully, without question.
But the moment passed and he found himself standing
at the open door of his father's workshop.
Loup was playing rather timidly with Mireio, and
Anfos was sawing a heavy log. The sawdust sprayed
out either side of the saw and drifted to the ground
where it gradually formed itself into a little golden
hillock. The sun fell on the biting steel of the blade
and on the strong, hairy arm behind it; the arm was
thickly corded with veins and covered with trickles
of perspiration. Christophe stood silent and motionless,
watching. And as he stood there, the kind woodland
.odour of the log upon which the apprentice was
working, the more pungent odour of freshly planed
planks grown sticky and resinous in the sunshine, the
faint but persistent odour of sweat that rose from the
straining body of Anfos; the toil, and the heat, and
the clean dry litter, his father's tools on the bench
near the entrance, indeed all that made up the spirit
of that place began to stir in him a startled awareness,
began to take on a reality as new as it was surely
infinitely old, so that he wondered if what he saw was
being actually seen or remembered; and if remem-
bered, with whose memory; and if seen, by whose
eyes—his own or another's. . . ,
136