Page:Three stories by Vítězslav Hálek (1886).pdf/342

 only to sit upright or stand and she saw in a moment all the surrounding world: all the other graves, the ruddy-painted cross with the white iron figure of the Christus, the whole sky, and her cheerfulness was at once restored. But here! if you felt oppressed, standing upright was of slight service to you. You must go quite away, and yourself cause a kind of rustling with your own footsteps, a kind of crunching of the gravel, which here was the source of so much trepidation.

And then a little pebble sometimes rolled over the rocky wall, and you could hear above measure distinctly its every tap again the rocky angles of the stone. Or sometimes a lizard, sunning itself, let fall a morsel of earth, and this, crumbling and rolling down, rustled in a quite mysterious manner. Some times a puff of wind carried a leaflet hither from the beech trees which grew yonder above the ravine, and this leaflet quivered and fluttered in the air as if it trembled and dreaded to take the final plunge. Here every feeble whisper became a voice.

Sometimes when they were seated here they had not the least wish to utter a word. A word here was re-echoed from the walls of the ravine, the walls themselves spoke their own language, and it was in a manner cheery enough—but you could not bear it long. Here they generally uttered their thoughts to one another only in whispers, seated side by side in order that they might not infuriate those walls. But