Page:The plumed serpent - 1926.djvu/117
the big sun and the stars like a tree holding out its leaves.
She wanted an old Spanish house, with its inner patio of flowers and water. Turned inwards, to the few flowers walled in by shadow. To turn one’s back on the cog-wheel world. Not to look out any more on to that horrible machine of the world. To look at one’s own quiet little fountain and one’s own little orange trees, with only heaven above.
So, having soothed her heart, she wrote Don Ramón again, that she was coming to Sayula to look for a house. She sent Villiers away. And the next day she set off with a man-servant, in the old motor-boat of the hotel, down to the village of Sayula.
It was thirty-five miles to travel, down the long lake. But the moment she set off, she felt at peace. A tall dark-faced fellow sat in the stern of the boat, steering and attending to the motor. She sat on cushions in the middle. And the young man-servant perched in the prow.
They started before sunrise, when the lake was bathed in motionless light. Odd tufts of water-hyacinth were travel- ling on the soft spermy water, holding up a green leaf like a little sail of a boat, and nodding a delicate, mauve blue flower.
Give me the mystery and let the world live again for me! Kate cried to her own soul. And deliver me from man’s automatism.
The sun rose, and a whiteness of light played on the tops of the mountains. The boat hugged the north shore, turning the promontory on which the villas had started so jauntily, twenty years ago, but now were lapsing back to wilderness. All was still and motionless in the light. Sometimes, on the little bare patches high up on the dry hills were white specks; birds? No, men in their white cotton, peons hoeing. They were so tiny and so distinct, they looked like white birds settled.
Round the bend were the hot springs, the church, the inaccessible village of the pure Indians, who spoke no Spanish. There were some green trees, under the precipitous, dry mountain-side.
So on and on, the motor-boat chugging incessantly, the man in the bows coiled up like a serpent, watching; the fish-milk water gleaming and throwing off a dense light, so that