Page "fiction" Paragraph 56

-- In France he had puzzled the meaning of the great stone monuments men had thrown up to the sky, and always as he wandered, he felt a stranger to their exultation.

They were poems in a strange language, of which he could barely touch a meaning -- enough to make his being ache with the desire for the fullness he sensed there.

Brittany, that stone-gray mystery through which he traveled for thirty days, sleeping in the barns of farmers or alongside roads, had worked some subtle change in him, he knew, and it was in Brittany that he had met Pierre.