palm, and once, on a blustery day when it was unpleasant in the forests, and the wind was howling in the crowns of the swaying trees, I ventured down into the outspread landscape. It took three-quarters of an hour to get to the nearest village on foot, though it had seemed within easy reach. It lay in broad meadows behind a pheasantry, a mill, and a fishpond. I persuaded Žana to be my guide, a strapping, twenty-year-old country girl who knew every corner of the region. We went into the valley at one o’clock on a cloudy afternoon. It rained off and on. The clouds banked up in the west and rolled forward strongly. Women in colourful costume were working in a field of rapeseed, half mown, which rippled in the soft pink, verging on orange, of the land, and which lay in regular rows on the other side, binding it up. Out of the dark background of the forests, somewhere through a narrow slit in the clouds, a narrow ray of light broke through and illumined everything. The golden, slanting rapeseed, as well as the blue, red and yellow dresses of the women, saturated with the rain, were irradiated and suffused with the glow. On the outskirts of the village, between barns with thatched roofs, we encountered an old man. He was walking slowly, and carefully clutching the fences. He was bareheaded. His jaw seemed shrunken, and the sockets of his eyes were black and empty below his half-closed eyelids. Where the fences ended and he had nothing on which to hold, he extended his hands in front of him, with palms outstretched, into the void, and walked slowly in his coarse blue canvas clothes, barefoot, scarcely moving forward. When we passed him he muttered something incomprehensible and fell silent. Žana took me to the large farm of the village mayor. A large, stout peasant woman with a rectangular face, lazy, ( 98 )
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