...of a landscape

They continued walking, one behind the other now. They crossed a chaos of rocks, then entered a thorny undergrowth. Fintan followed Bony and felt no fatigue. Brambles tore his clothes. His legs were bleeding.
Towards noon they reached the hills. There were a few isolated houses where dogs were barking. Bony climbed up a worn, dark grey boulder, which crumbled into shards under his feet. From the top of the rock they could see the entire expanse of the plateau, the distant villages, the fields, and, almost unreal, the bed of a river shining among the trees. But what drew their gaze was a great fault in the plateau where the red earth glowed like the edges of a wound.
Fintan looked at every detail of the landscape. There was a great silence here, only the light rustling of the wind on the shale, the thin echo of the dogs. Fintan dared not speak. He saw that Bony too was contemplating the expanse of the plateau, the red fault. It was a mysterious place, far from the world, a place where one could forget everything. "This is where he ought to come," thought Fintan, thinking of Geoffroy. At the same time he was astonished he no longer felt any rancour. This place obliterated everything, even the burning of the sun and the stinging of poisonous leaves; even thirst and hunger. Even beatings.

[Onitsha, Le Clézio, J. M. G.]