The Fall

by Albert Camus

Holland is a reverie, sir, a dream of gold and smoke, more smoky by day and golden at night, while night and day this reverie is filled with Lohengrins like these, dreamily going past on their black bicycles with high handlebars, funerary swans endlessly drifting past, throughout the country, around the sea, along the canals. They are dreaming, their heads in their copper clouds, they ride around, they pray, like sleepwalkers in the gilded incense of the mist, and they are no longer here. They have departed, to travel thousands of kilometres away, to Java, the distant isle. They pray to those grimacing gods of Indonesia which they have set up in all their windows and which, at this moment, are drifting around above our heads before alighting, like resplendent monkeys, on the shop signs and stepped roofs, to remind these nostalgic colonials that Holland is not only the Europe of the counting-house, but the sea, the sea that leads to Cipango and those islands where men die happy and insane.