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Wind, Sand and Stars

I lay there pondering my situation, lost in the desert and in danger, naked between sky and sand, withdrawn by too much silence from the poles of my life. I knew that I should wear out days and weeks returning to them if I were not sighted by some plane, or if next day the Moors did not find and murder me. Here I possessed nothing in the world. I was no more than a mortal strayed between sand and stars, conscious of the single blessing of breathing. And yet I discovered myself filled with dreams.

They came to me soundlessly, Iike the waters of a spring, and in the beginning I could not understand the sweetness that was invading me. There was neither voice nor vision, but the presentiment of a presence, of a warmth very close and already half guessed. Then I began to grasp what was going on, and shutting my eyes I gave myself up to the enchantment of my memory.

Somewhere there was a park dark with firs and Iinden-trees and an old house that I loved. It mattered little that it was far away, that it could not warm me in my flesh, nor shelter me, reduced here to the role of dream. It was enough that it existed to flll my night with its presence. I was no longer this body
 flung up on a strand; I oriented myself; I was the child of this house, fllled with the memory of its odours, with the cool breath of its vestibules, with the voices that had animated it even to the very frogs in the pools that came here to be with me. I needed these thousand landmarks to identify myself, to
discover of what absences the savour of this desert was composed, to find a meaning in this silence made of a thousand silences, where the very frogs were silent.