“Trees with motionless leaves interlaced so densely that they seemed a wall of black bronze. One had to hack one's way through the vegetation with an axe, and even the roots were intertwined like knots of serpents.”
Gustave Flaubert, Salammbô (1862)
Where we witness once more, though from another perspective, Don Carotte and Warmblood marveling, during their second journey toward the forest, with almost childlike wonder at the world that welcomes them.
– The occasional reader may sometimes have the impression of hearing the same voice, before discovering that this voice looks upon the world from another point of view. If Don Carotte contemplates above all the world's presence...
– What does Warmblood do?
– He is more attentive to its imperceptible transitions and its silent displacements. Without being more analytical, he is perhaps already more sensitive to what changes beneath the appearance of what endures...
Excerpt from Warmblood's Journal
The day was almost over when the forest appeared before us once again. I say appeared once again, for even before recognizing the slightest detail or the smallest bend in the path, I knew with certainty that we had returned to it... I had already made its acquaintance. That impression came before any genuine memory. Although certain forms still remained unfamiliar to us, their way of inhabiting the world no longer did.
At that uncertain hour, the trees did not merely seem to rise; they appeared to uphold an architecture of which we could perceive only the lowest foundations. Their trunks ascended with such tranquil uprightness that they suggested less the idea of growth than that of necessity. Above our heads, the foliage joined into so dense a vault that light descended only with the greatest reluctance. It did not fall upon things; it disclosed them slowly, as though still hesitating to reveal them.
We walked without haste. Nothing invited us to quicken our pace. On the contrary, I felt that any form of haste here would have amounted to misunderstanding the place itself. A forest of such antiquity does not welcome the traveler; it first teaches him by compelling him to slow down.
I then noticed that the trees did not form a multitude but a single upward movement. Each trunk seemed to continue the effort begun by the others; each branch received its share of light only to pass it farther on. Every leaf appeared willing to occupy only the smallest place so that the whole might remain possible. What from afar might have seemed disorder gradually revealed, as the eye surrendered to its own slowness, an economy of almost austere precision. If nothing appeared to be lacking, neither did anything seem superfluous.
Several times I found myself stopping, less in order to observe than to allow things to continue their work without me. Then the slightest movements became perceptible: a fern slowly recovering its balance after the passage of an insect... a vine still swaying, though one could no longer tell whether the wind or some now invisible animal had set it in motion. Elsewhere we noticed bark whose fissures retained enough moisture to nourish an entire people of tiny mosses. I had the curious impression that the forest produced nothing in isolation. Every detail seemed to be the consequence of another, itself sustained by yet another still. It was as though the whole visible world proceeded from an ancient conversation of which we could hear only a few scattered words.
Silence itself took part in that conversation. It did not oppose the sounds; it merely gave each of them its proper distance. The calls of birds, the crackling of dead wood beneath our feet, the living wood continuing its slow ascent, the shining drops falling from high above—nothing ever seemed to interrupt that silence. On the contrary, everything appeared to belong to it, just as the slightest ripples belong to the image of water that remains perfectly still.
I looked at Don Carotte. Nothing in his bearing betrayed the slightest anxiety. Yet I thought I discerned in him a new openness, as though something within him had already consented to withdraw so that something else might come into being. I cannot say what led me to that thought. It rested upon no observable fact. Perhaps, I told myself, the deepest transformations begin precisely when no event has yet announced them.
That thought remained with me until night had fully fallen.
When the moon finally appeared between the highest branches, we continued our walk almost without speaking. This silence did not separate the two travelers we were; it went before us. Gradually, we had less the feeling of walking through a forest than of entering, very slowly, into a thought whose consequences neither of us was yet capable of measuring.
