And I stayed.

I shoved a box under the dormer-window, I pushed open the wooden
shutter ... and there! Before me lay the wide stretch in the blazing
sunlight! My eyes were quite blind with it.

'Twas good up here and funny to see everything from so high up, so
endlessly far! And the people were no bigger than tiny tadpoles!

Just under my dormer-window came a path, a white sand-path winding from
behind the house and then running forwards to the horizon in a line
straight as an arrow. It looked like a naked strip of ground, powdered
white and showing up sharply, like a flat snake, in the middle of the
green fields which, broken into their many-coloured squares, lay blinking
in the sun.

This path was deserted, lonely, as though nor man nor beast had ever
trodden it. It lay very near the house and I did not know it from up
here; it looked now like a long strip of drab linen, which lay bleaching
in a boundless meadow. And that again suited my loneliness so well! At
last, I looked and saw nothing more. And that path!...

Slowly, overcome by that silent, restful idleness, I fell a-dreaming; and
that path, that long, white path seemed to me to have become a part of my
own being, something like a life that began over there, far away yonder
in the clear blue, to end in the unknown, here, behind the gable-end, cut
off at that fatal bend.

After long looking, I saw something, very far off; it came so slowly, so
softly, like a thing that grows, and those two little black patches grew