NEWS OF SPRING 



perpendicular as an iron curtain; and the tree was born there, 

 two hundred yards above the torrent, inaccessible and solitary, 

 among the burning and barren stones. From the first hour, 

 it had sent its blind roots on a long and painful search for 

 precarious water and soil. But this was only the native 

 anxiety of a species that knows the aridity of the South. The 

 young stem had to solve a much graver and more unexpected 

 problem: it started from a vertical plane, so that its top, in- 

 stead of rising towards the sky, bent down over the gulf. It 

 was obliged, therefore, notwithstanding the increasing weight 

 of its branches, to correct the first flight, stubbornly to bend 

 its disconcerted trunk in the form of an elbow close to the 

 rock and thus, like a swimmer who throws back his head, by 

 means of incessant will-power, tension and contraction to hold 

 its heavy crown of leaves straight up into the sky. 



Thenceforward, all the preoccupations, all the energy, 

 all the free and conscious genius of the plant had centred 

 around that vital knot. The monstrous, hypertrophied elbow 

 revealed, one by one, the successive solicitudes of a kind of 

 thought that knew how to profit by the warning which it re- 

 ceived from the rains and the storms. Year by year, the leafy 

 dome grew heavier, with no other care than to expand in the 



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