Promenade 15
"Tous les Chevaux du Roi..."
Verily, the river is deep, and peaceful and vast are the waters of my infancy, in a kingdom which I'd believed to have left so long ago. All the king's horses may come and drink at their leisure, quenching of their thirst without the waters ever drying up! They descend from the glaciers, full of the ardor of distant snows, with the sweetness of the clay of the plains. I've just written about one of those horses, which was led to drink by a child and which drank at length to its full content. And I saw another that came to drink for a moment or two, in search of that same youngster - but it did not linger. Someone must have chased it off. And, to speak truly, that's all. Yet I also see numberless herds of horses who wander the plains, dying of thirst - as recently as this morning their whinnying dragged me from my bed, and at an unaccustomed hour, although I am on the verge of my 60's and cherish my tranquillity. There was no help for it, I was obliged to get up. It gave me pain to see them, horridly raw-boned and skinny, although there was no lack of abundance of good water or green pasture. Yet one might speak of a kind of malignant magical spell that has fallen over the land that I once found so accomodating, contaminating its generous waters. Who knows? One could imagine that some kind of plot had been hatched by the horse-traders of the land to bring down prices! Or it may be that this country no longer possesses any children for leading the horses to water, and that the horses will remain thirsty until there is a child who rediscovers the road that leads to the stream....
Return to
Return to