For the First Time

(This tale is extracted from the Famous Causes)

The sun beat hard. To the right and left of the winding path, where Robert advanced painfully, some stunted trees stretched their leaves soft and as enervated by heat. Robert, in passing, tore one, which let itself go immediately between his hands, like a trusting animal. It is a little later that he perceived the building, inheritance of a vague uncle, of which he came to take possession.
This building overlooked the path, already very close and curiously arranged: whatever were in effect the detours or zigzags that the man happened to make, he could henceforth raise the eyes without seeing profile above his head the merlons of granite of a powerful round tower, whose masonry was so dense that one did not avoid imagining around a quarry from which it had been extracted.
The tower was pierced with a sort of bull's eye, and, each time it came back to hit him, Robert received from it an impression of wound. As if some watchman had directed on him, from up there, instead of arrows or boiling oil, a powerful and pointed gaze.
It seemed to him suddenly that he could not always escape this gaze. The monument must be still at several days' march. Who knows if the neighboring cliff was not sculpted with gigantic figures, true divinities? The light weighed heavily, Robert had the temptation to advance on all fours.
Hastening the step, he penetrated into the edifice by an irregular notch, and found himself in the lower part of a circular chimney. The walls were hollowed with symmetrical alveoli, whose median opened one knows not on what darkness. And Robert felt finally that the shadow let weigh on him, like a spider web on an insect, a threat, greater certainly than death would have been, but elusive to tell the truth, and whose particular virulence held precisely to this equivocal.

Such was this disused lime kiln. "But how to manage, said Robert to himself, to see from the first blow the things for the second time?"