Note: Translator Pauline Bancroft Flach died in 1966, less than 70 years ago. Therefore, this work is protected by copyright, restricting your legal rights to reproduce it. However, you are welcome to view it on screen, as you do now. Read more about copyright.
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was revealed to them that something unusual was
occurring.
It could not be a night like any other, for on the
edge of the cliff they saw the strangest being. They
thought at first that it was an old twisted olive
trunk; then they thought that an ancient statue
from the temple of Jupiter had wandered out on the
cliff. At last they saw that it could only be the old
sibyl.
They had never seen anything so old, so
weatherbeaten, and so gigantic. If the emperor had not been
there, they would have all fled home to their beds.
“It is she,” they whispered to each other, “who
counts as many years as there are grains of sand on
her native shores. Why has she come out of her
cave to-night? What does she foretell to the
emperor and to the country, she who writes her
prophecies on the leaves of trees, and knows that the
wind carries the words of the oracle to him who
needs them?”
They were so terrified that all would have fallen
on their knees with their foreheads to the ground
had the sibyl made the slightest movement. But
she sat as still as if she had been without life.
Crouched on the very edge of the cliff, and shading
her eyes with her hand, she stared out into the
night. She sat there as if she had gone up on the
hill the better to see something happening far
away. She alone could see something in the black
night!
At the same moment the emperor and all his suite
perceived how intense the darkness was. Not one
of them could see a hand’s-breadth in front of him.
And what a calm, what silence! They could not
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