Sanatorium Under The Sign Of The Hourglass - Plot & Excerpts
The place where we stayed was in a neighboring county, in a wooded valley of the River Slotvinka, which resounded with the murmur of innumerable underground springs. With our ears still filled with the rustle of beech trees and the chirping of birds, we rode in a large old landau, crowned with an enormous hood. We sat underneath it among numerous bundles in a kind of velvet-lined cavernous alcove, looking through the window at the changing landscape, colorful like pictures slowly dealt out from a pack. At dusk we reached a plateau—the vast, startled crossroads of the country. The sky over it was deep, breathless, and windswept. Here was the farthest tollgate of the country, the last turning, beyond which the landscape of early autumn opened lower down. The frontier too was here, marked by an old, rotting frontier post with a faded inscription on a board that swayed in the wind. The great wheels of the landau creaked as they sank in the sand, and the chattering spokes fell silent; only the large hood droned dully and flapped darkly in the crosswinds, like an ark that had landed in a desert.
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