I
The ravine was deep and dark.
Its yellow clay slopes, overgrown with red-trunked pines, presented
craggy ridges; at the bottom flowed a brook. Above, right and left,
grew a pine forest--dark, ancient, covered with lichen and shubbery.
Overhead was a grey, heavy, low-hanging sky.
Man seldom came to this wild and savage spot.
The trees had in the course of time been uprooted by storms of wind
and rain, and had fallen just where they stood, strewing the earth,
rotting, emitting thick pungent odours of decaying pinewood.
Thistles, chicory, milfoil, and wormwood had flourished there for
years undisturbed, and they now covered the ground with thorny
bristles. There was a den of bears at the bottom of the ravine; many
wolves prowled through the forest.
Over the edge of the steep, yellow slope hung a fallen pine, and for
many years its roots were exposed, raised on high in the air. They
looked like some petrified octopus stretching up its hideous
tentacles to the elements, and were already covered with lichen and
juniper.
In the midst of these roots two great grey birds--a male and a
female--had built themselves a nest.
They were large and grey, thickly covered by yellowish-grey and
cinnamon-coloured feathers. Their wings were short, broad, and
strong; their feet, armed with great claws, were covered with black
down. Surmounting their short, thick necks were large quadratic heads
with yellow, rapaciously curved beaks and round, fierce, heavy
looking eyes.
The female was the smaller. Her legs were more slender and handsome,
and there was a kind of rough, heavy gracefulness in the curves of
her neck. The male was fierce and stiff; his left wing did not fold
properly; he had injured it at the time he had fought other males for
his mate.
There was steepness on three sides of their nest. Above it was the
wide expanse of the sky. Around, about, and beneath it lay bones
washed and whitened by the rain. The nest itself was made of stones
and mud, and overspread with down.
The female always sat in the nest.
The male hummed to himself on the end of a root that was suspended
over the steep, alone, peering far into the distance around and below
him with his heavy, pensive eyes; perched with his head sunk deep
into his shoulders and his wings hanging heavily down.