Journeys are not undertaken lightly in the High Country. Farms may be five or ten miles from their nearest neighbor. Often it would be one solitary man traveling those miles to see another solitary man; he never does this even once in his life. Or else it''d be a whole tribe of adults, children, and old people setting off toward another whole tribe of adults, children, old people - to see what? Women demolished by repeated pregnancies, red-faced men, and crooked old folks (and children too) - only to be looked down on by them? The hell with that. If anyone wants to show themselves, they''ll do it at the markets. Twenty, twenty-five miles separate the villages that neatly line the circuit formed by the road. In the surrounding country there are beech trees, chestnuts, sessile oaks - beeches that grow more massive the farther out you go, sessiles that are ever more ancient; far removed from any dealings with men, there are families of birches that are lovely in summer and that disappear, white against white, in the snow. On the moors there''s lavender, broom, esparto, sedge, dandelion, and then rocks, rounded rocks, as if long ago, up in these heights, great rivers used to pass through; then finally, in the great open spaces are flat rocks, resonant as bells, that repeat the slightest sound - the hop of a cricket, the patter of a mouse, the slithering of an adder, or the wind glancing off these terrestrial springboards.
The sky is often black, or at least dark blue, though giving the impression black would give - except during the blooming of the wild mignonette, whose exquisite scent is so joyful it dispels all melancholy. The time of the mignonette aside, fine weather is not cheerful in these parts; nor is it sad, it''s something else; those who find it to their liking can no longer do without it. Bad weather is thoroughly seductive too, immediately assuming as it does a cosmic air. There''s something galactic, extra-galactic even, in the way it behaves. It cannot rain here the way it does elsewhere - you sense that God personally sees to it; here the wind matter-of-factly takes the fate of the world in hand. The storm adapts its ways here: it doesn''t flash, doesn''t make any noise; simply, metallic objects begin to gleam - belt buckles, lace hooks onshoes, clasps, eyeglasses, bracelets, rings, chains. ; you have to mind how you go. You often find twenty, even thirty magnificent beeches struck by lightning all in a row, dead from head to foot, burned to a cinder, upright, black, bearing witness to the fact that things happen in that silence.
Dusk is more often green than red, and goes on for a very long time - so long that in the end you can''t help noticing that night has fallen and that now the light is coming from the stars. In these parts the stars light your way; they''re bright enough for people to recognize each other when their paths cross. It may be that you see more stars here than elsewhere; in any case, they''re certainly larger, for there''s something about the air - whether its purity, which is exceptional, renders the constellations more vivid or whether, as some claim, it contains some substance that acts like a magnifying glass. Naturally, no one''s going to boast about having been way out in the open in the depths of night. Whenever they see it coming on, people skedaddle home before it arrives. There''s a way of behaving toward this land that was perfected by our ancestors and that has produced excellent results; indeed, it''s the only way: you shape yourself to it. Every accident that''s been seen to happen here - and they''re countless in number, including many that are strange indeed - comes from some infringement of these sorts of rules or laws. There''s nothing more straightforward for example than going from Villesèche to the Pas de Redortier in daylight; it''ll take you an hour at most.
The landscape isn''t exactly cheerful, but it''s doable; all it needs is a bit of will, or passion (if it''s for hunting), or foolishness (if it''s for no reason). But on a day when the clouds are low and dense, and night falls, try then! No one will chance it. The tool that people around here have most often in their hand is a shotgun, whether it''s for hunting or for, let''s say, philosophical reflection; in either case, there''s no solution without a shot being fired. The gun hangs from the stem of a wineglass that''s been embedded in the wall near the chair where the man of the house sits. Whether this chair is at the table or by the fireplace, the shotgun is always within arm''s reach. It''s not that the region is unsafe because of a lack of police; on the contrary, even in the heyday of banditry there was never any crime up here, except for one incident in 1928, and that one was precisely about what everyone is afraid of. Everyone is afraid of loneliness. Families are no solution: at most they''re collections of lonesome people who in reality are each heading in their own direction.
Families don''t come together around someone; they separate as they move away from someone. Then there''s metaphysics - and not the Sorbonne kind, rather the sort you have to bear in mind in confronting irredeemable solitude and the outside world. Monsieur Sartre would not be of much use here; a shotgun, on the other hand, comes in handy in many situations. It might seem surprising that these peasants don''t grasp the handles of a plow. The reason is that the peasants are shepherds. That''s also what keeps them beyond (and above) technological progress. No one has yet invented a machine for minding sheep. The father, head of the family, oversees the flock; the son or sons are in charge of the small farm that in fact functions as a closed economy.
People only till the acreage necessary for enough wheat, barley, potatoes, and vegetables to meet the needs of the family or the individual, and that is why so many of the peasants remain unmarried, living alone: in this way they have need of so little that they spend no more than one month a year scraping the earth.