[يارب جملنا]

الوحدة التاسعة:ص 75

Exrract 1


about forty years ago. I was taking long trip on foot over mountain heights unknown to tourists All around and colourless land Nothing grew there but wild lavender
After five hours walking Ihad still not found water All about me was the same dryness the same coarse grasses i thought isaw in the the distance a small black silhouette it was a shepherd Thirty sheep were lying about him on the baking earth He gave me drink and took me to his cottage on the plain
i felt peace in the presence of this man I asked if i might rest here for a day he found it quite natural he gave me the impression that nothing could suprise him i did not actually need to rest but i was interested and wished to know more about him




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Exrract 2

I noticed that he carried for a stick an iron rod as thick as my thumb and about a metre and a half long . He began his iron rod into the earth, making a hole in which he plated an acorn; the he refilled the hole. He was planting oak trees.
I suppose I must have been fairly insistent in my questioning,for he answered me. for ther years he had been planting trees in this wilderness. He had planted one hundred thousand . Of the hundred thousand, twenty thousand had sprouted. Of the twent thousand, he still expected to lose half. There remained ten thousand oak tree to grow where nothing hd grown before.
The was when I began to wonder about the age of this man. He was obviously over fifty. fifty- five he told me. His name was Elzeard Bouffier. I told him that in thirty yeares his ten thousand oaks would be magnificent. The next day we parted.


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Exrract 3
I had seen too many men die during those five years not to imagine that Elzeard Bouffier was dead. As amatter of fact, he was extremely well. He had changed jobs. He had got rid of the sheep because they threatened his young trees. for, he told me, the war had disturbed him not at all. He had continued to plant.

The okas were then ten years old and taller than both of us. It was an impressive spectacle. I was literally speechless and, as he did not talk, It measured eleven kilometres in length and there kilometres at its greatest width. When you remembered that all this had come from the hands of this one man, you understood that men could be effectiv in other ways than destruction.



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Exrract 4


The bus put me down in vergons. In 1913 this village of ten or twelve houses had three inhabitants. nettles were feeding upon abandoned hoses. Now everthing had changed. Event the air. Instead of the haesh dry winds, a gentle breeze was blowing. laden with scents. A sound like water came from the mountains: it was the wind in the forest. I saw a fountain had been built. Ruins had been cleared away, and five houses restored. Now there were twenty-eight inhabitants, four of them young married couples It was now a village where one would like to live.

When i think that one man was able to cause this to grow from wasteland, I am convinced that in spite of everything, humanity is good.

Elzeard Bouffier dead peacefully in his sleep in 1947.