Page:Karl Gjellerup - The Pilgrim Kamanita - 1911.djvu/168



followed them long with his eyes and wandered. And then he wondered at his wonder.

"How does it happen that everything here seems so strange to me? If I belong to this place, why does not everything appear perfectly natural? But every new thing I see is a puzzle and fills me with astonishment. For example, this odour that now floats past me so suddenly? How absolutely different it is from all other flower scents here—much fuller and more powerful, attracting and disquieting at the same time. Where can it come from? But where do I myself come from? It seems to me as though I had been, but a short time ago, a mere nothing. Or did I have an existence? Only not here? If so, where? And how have I come here?"

While he revolved these questions in his mind his body had risen up, without his perceiving it, from the meadow, and he was already floating onward—though not in a direction taken by any of the others. He made his way upwards towards a depression in the crest of the hill. As he passed over it he was greeted by a yet more powerful breath of that new and strange perfume.

Kamanita, however, flew onward.

Beyond the hill the neighbourhood lost something of its charm. The show of flowers was scantier, the shrubbery darker, the groves more deer, the rocks more forbidding 158