Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/90

62 tops, then the roofs of the houses appeared above the foliage; the piles of the churches, surging above the high houses, looked across the roofs of warehouses, markets, historic halls, higher and always higher, towers, donjons, campaniles, pointing, mounting, seeming to climb the sky, till the moment came when they all ceased, vanquished, breathless, except the glorious tower of the cathedral. That alone continued its ascension, leaving far behind the highest of the others. Again! Again! In its turn it abandons the attempt. It overhangs the city and towers above the country. The aerial and lacy belfry surpasses all its rivals, so high that one can now see nothing else. Antwerp is eclipsed by a bend in the river; the tower, like a proud lighthouse, marks the location of the powerful metropolis. And Laurent contemplated the tower of Notre Dame until it melted, slowly, into the far distance where the blue horizon paled.

Then the devout passenger began to look at the banks of the river; clayey polders, reddish brickyards among green dykes; white villas curtained by trees, whose vast lawns, descending gently to the banks, afforded a perspective from the river. But, more than all else, the Scheldt itself made an impression upon the boy. He filled his heart with it through his eyes, his nostrils, his ears, with the avidity of an exile on the eve of banishment; he drank in pictures that were to be the stuff of his dreams during so many to-morrows.

Leaning against the rail at the stern, he amused himself with the foamy back- wash of their wake, with a flock of sea gulls, battering down upon the water, calling each other with a harsh cry, with the bulging, heavily laden lighters which passed by the yacht, with sails that were like landmarks in the far reaches of the