felt not a touch of cold, and awakened with unusually lightsome and clear
sensations.

With that, I shook myself, got once more into my boots and gaiters, and,
breaking up the rest of the bread for Modestine, strolled about to see in
what part of the world I had awakened. Ulysses, left on Ithaca, and with
a mind unsettled by the goddess, was not more pleasantly astray. I have
been after an adventure all my life, a pure dispassionate adventure, such
as befell early and heroic voyagers; and thus to be found by morning in a
random woodside nook in Gevaudan--not knowing north from south, as
strange to my surroundings as the first man upon the earth, an inland
castaway--was to find a fraction of my day-dreams realised. I was on the
skirts of a little wood of birch, sprinkled with a few beeches; behind,
it adjoined another wood of fir; and in front, it broke up and went down
in open order into a shallow and meadowy dale. All around there were
bare hilltops, some near, some far away, as the perspective closed or
opened, but none apparently much higher than the rest. The wind huddled
the trees. The golden specks of autumn in the birches tossed
shiveringly. Overhead the sky was full of strings and shreds of vapour,
flying, vanishing, reappearing, and turning about an axis like tumblers,
as the wind hounded them through heaven. It was wild weather and
famishing cold. I ate some chocolate, swallowed a mouthful of brandy,
and smoked a cigarette before the cold should have time to disable my
fingers. And by the time I had got all this done, and had made my pack
and bound it on the pack-saddle, the day was tiptoe on the threshold of
the east. We had not gone many steps along the lane, before the sun,
still invisible to me, sent a glow of gold over some cloud mountains that
lay ranged along the eastern sky.

The wind had us on the stern, and hurried us bitingly forward. I