Read Online The Horla by Guy de Maupassant - Free Book Online Page B

again; the trees were dancing; the earth was floating; I had to sit down. And then, I no longer knew how I had gotten there! Strange idea! Strange! Strange idea! I didn’t know anymore. I left by the path that was at my right, and I returned to the avenue that had brought me to the middle of the forest.
    June 3
. The night was horrible. I am going to go away for a few weeks. A little journey will surely set me to rights.
    July 2
. I have returned. I am cured. And I’ve had a delightful excursion, too. I visited Mont Saint-Michel, which I’d never seen before.
    What a vision, when you arrive, as I did, in Avranches, towards the end of day! The city is on a hill; and I was led into the public garden, on the edge of the city. I let out a cry of astonishment. A vast bay stretched out in front of me, as far as the eye couldsee, between two coasts far apart from each other, disappearing in the distance into the mist; and in the middle of this immense yellow bay, beneath a luminous golden sky, there rose up, dark and sharp-pointed, a strange mountain, in the middle of the sands. The sun had just disappeared, and on the still blazing horizon the outline of this fantastic rock stood out, bearing on its summit a fantastic monument.
    At dawn, I went towards it. The sea was low, as it had been the night before, and I watched the surprising abbey rise before me as I approached it. After several hours of walking, I reached the massive hill of stones that supports the little city dominated by the great church. After climbing the narrow, steep street, I entered the most wonderful Gothic dwelling built for God on Earth, vast as a city, full of low chambers crushed beneath vaults, and high galleries supported by frail columns. I entered this giant granite jewel, light as lace, covered with towers and slim pinnacles, in which winding staircases rise up, and which hurl into the blue sky of day, and the dark sky of night, their strange heads bristling with chimeras, devils, fantastic animals, monstrous flowers, and which are linked to each other by slender, finely carved arches.
    When I was at the summit, I said to the monk who was with me, “Father, how happy you must be here!”
    He answered, “It is very windy, Monsieur”; and we set to talking as we watched the sea rise, as itcame running onto the sand and covering it with a breastplate of steel.
    And the monk told me stories, all the old stories of this place, legends, always more legends.
    One of them particularly struck me. The local people, the ones who live on the hill, claim they hear voices at night in the sands. They say they hear two goats bleating, one with a strong voice, the other with a feeble voice. Scoffers assert they’re the cries of seabirds, which sometimes resemble bleating, and sometimes human moans; but late-night fishermen swear they have seen, roaming about on the dunes, between the two tides, around the little town cast so far from the world, an old shepherd, whose head, covered with his cloak, could never be seen; and who led, walking in front of them, a billygoat with a man’s face, and a nanny-goat with a woman’s face, both with long white hair, talking ceaselessly, arguing with each other in an unknown language, then suddenly stopping to bleat with all their might.
    I said to the monk, “Do you believe this?”
    He murmured, “I don’t know!”
    I said, “If other beings besides us exist on Earth, why didn’t we meet them a long time ago? Why haven’t you yourself seen them? Why haven’t I seen them, myself?”
    He replied, “Do we see the hundred-thousandth part of what exists? Look, here is the wind, which is the strongest force in nature, which knocks mendown, destroys buildings, uproots trees, whips the sea up into mountains of water, destroys cliffs, and throws great ships onto the shoals; here is the wind that kills, whistles, groans, howls—have you ever seen it, and can you see it? Yet it exists.”
    I fell silent before this simple