After a minute or two I could not help laughing. And as, scrutinizing my face, they caught the change in it, they joined me. One after another all faces round me lightened up and broke in laughter. In the faces of toothless old women a hundred delicate wrinkles screwed up cheeks and chin into a baroque, beaming mask – and they were no longer scars left by the warfare of life, but the traces of many laughters.

The merriment ran along the terrace and spread to the edge of it like ripples on water. There are few things in life as sweet as this suddenly rising, clear tide of African laughter surrounding one.

Legend has it that a Gaul

seeing wild, fierce Gallic courage

mowed down round him by the rigid

discipline of Roman legions,

heavenwards shot his last arrow

at the God whom he had worshipped,

at the God who had betrayed him.

And then fell with cloven forehead.

From the bones of fallen Gauls

peasants of the land built fences

round their fair and fruitful vineyards.

No one had a nobler burial.

Echoes from the Hills

I have the great good luck in life that when I sleep I dream, and my dreams are always beautiful. The nightmare, with its squint-eyed combination of claustrophobia and horror vacui, I know from other people’s accounts only, and mostly, for the last twenty years, from books and theatre. This gift of dreaming runs in my family, it is highly valued by all of us and makes us feel that we have been favoured above other human beings. An old aunt of mine asked to have written on her tombstone: ‘She saw many a hard day. But her nights were sweet.’

But our beautiful dreams are not confined to the spheres of the idyll or the child’s play, or to any such sphere as in the life of day-time is considered safe or pleasant. Horrible events take place in them, monsters appear, abysses open, wild turbulent flights and pursuits are familiar features of theirs. Only, on entering their world, horror changes hue. Monstrosity and monsters, Hell itself – they turn to favour and to prettiness.

I have read or been told that in a book of etiquette of the seventeenth century the very first rule forbids you to tell your dreams to other people, since they cannot possibly be of interest to them. I do not want to sin against seventeenth-century good manners and am not, here, going to report to my readers any particular dream of mine. But since dreams in general to me are a matter of interest, I shall set down a few general remarks about them. Should these remarks turn out somewhat vague and hazy, as if shimmering to the eyes, the reader will have to forbear with me. It is in the nature of things. Dreams, like smells, decline to yield up their inmost being to words.