Page:Halek's Stories and Evensongs.pdf/329

 pause abashed, and so many a time they broke off in the middle of their conversation, only listening, looking at one another, and holding one another by the hand.

They oftest trusted themselves to converse aloud when the woodland above them yonder also carried on its own conversation, when the wind unloosed its mouth, and when those organ-pipes which Staza had first heard in the woodland had their bellows full distended. Then a word was easily spoken, even the walls no longer seemed to spy upon them, having too much to occupy them in the hurly-burly of the woods above them, even the pebble ceased to whisper, nor could you hear the rustling of the lizard or the dropping of the morsels of soil. Then only articulate sounds uttered out loud could withstand the din, and thus also Frank and Staza conversed aloud.

Here and there the brambles trailed over the rocky walls in every kind of amicable embrace. In places the mullein’s tall stem shot upwards as if with some definite aim. “I have got so far at all events”, it seemed to say. At one of the corners of the rocky wall clung a single unlucky brier bush—clung in such a way that it could neither ascend or deseend, but hung clinging in mid-air above a perpetual abyss. More fortunately fared a single birch above it which grew symmetrically upwards, and striking its roots into several crevices of the rocky wall maintained itself on its giddy platform.

But one sound was here, which never languished but continually sated the ear with its gentle music. From one end of the rocky glen bubbled to the surface a spring of water pure as silver, and our ravine offered to it its own lowest parts, in which the spring might arrange its watercourses, and here it arranged them most tranquilly, like a good housewife. Where it suited best it had fishes eyes [a plant], where you least at all expected it, it had strawberries stowed away, and where only that was possible it had some bush, in order that it might be a mirror to the bush.

And this streamlet greatly tranquillized the savage wildness of the ravine. This streamlet seemed to make a charming chamber of that rock-bound tomb, a chamber which especially entertained and welcomed Staza. And so when Frank said, “Let us go to the ravine”, Staza at first remembered only its blank walls of rock with their scanty blackberry bushes, the wild sweetbrier, and the long lank birch-tree, and then she felt as though she must try very hard to be brave enough to go. But soon after this she remembered the water sporting with itself and babbling in its