But a rush of
inhibiting instinct checked him. Had death or violence menaced her he
could have done it, but without the incentive of the immediate horror
he could never rise so far beyond himself.
Susan climbed the rock's side to a plateau on its western face. The
sun beat on her like a furnace mouth. Here and there black filigrees
of shade shrank to the bases of splintered ledges. Below the plain lay
outflung in the stupor of midday. On its verge the mountains
stretched, a bright blue, shadowless film. A mirage trembled to the
south, a glassy vision, crystal clear amid the chalky streakings and
the rings of parched and blanching sinks. Across the prospect the
faint, unfamiliar mist hung as if, in the torrid temperature, the earth
was steaming.
She sat down on a shelf of rock not feeling the burning sunshine or the
heat that the baked ledges threw back upon her. The life within her
was so intense that no impressions from the outside could enter, even
her eyes took in no image of the prospect they dwelt on. Courant's
kiss had brought her to a place toward which, she now realized, she had
been moving for a long time, advancing upon it, unknowing, but impelled
like a somnambulist willed toward a given goal.
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