The large and rather melancholy hotel at Sonnenberg is a few paces away from the station. Marco directed himself to the porter who was seated in the empty vestibule, as deserted as the garden he had just passed through. Donna Maria Guasco had just gone out, the man said, as she usually did every morning, towards Gutsch, indicating the way with his hand; then he added in a very German French, that it was a fairly long walk. Scarcely listening to him, Marco set off through a broad wooded path. He walked without looking before him with lowered eyes, completely wrapped in his thoughts, without meeting any one, without looking at the landscape, almost without seeing where he was going. Every now and then the wind, which was freshening, caused the trees to rustle with an almost human sound, beating on Marco’s face, and, passing on, it grew weaker without disturbing his thoughts. He had lost count of the time he was on the way. At last at a corner he read on a post, “Gutsch,” indicated by a white arrow on a blue ground. He took the turning for some fifty steps, and then stopped silent and surprised.
He found himself in a strange wood, formed of tall, colossal trees, whose height the eye could not gauge. The trunks of the trees were round, thin, and devoid of branches to a considerable height, like the stems of bronze candlesticks; then the leafy branches mounted up so intricately and thickly, hiding the sky, that an invincible gloom reigned in the wood. The tall, colossal, upright trees, growing so close together, seemed innumerable, and rose in two lines along a very straight path in the middle, which lost itself in the calm, sad gloom, which the rays of the sun seemed unable to penetrate. Never had a wood seemed so strange and lugubrious to Marco’s wondering eyes, never had he breathed an air so still and sepulchral, and never had he noticed a silence so profound and gloomy. On either side of the path the dried leaves were scattered, of every colour from light yellow to dark red, but their colour had merged into one in that darkness of the tomb. A sense of tragic and fatal horror conquered his heart while he advanced under the ominous trees, like dismal funeral candles, in that wood without the song of birds, without the perfume of flowers and the sun’s rays. Terror surrounded him, and he seemed to be walking towards his strange destiny, towards the wooden seat beneath a bronze tree trunk, where Maria was seated and looking at him as he approached with sad but sweet eyes.