In 1936 or 1937, the young Albert Camus is in Oran, in his native Algeria, but he has Italy in mind: a view of the hills in Tuscany. "On each of these hills the olive-trees were pale as little wisps of smoke, while the cypress-trees were like darker shoots against their slight mist, the nearer ones green, the more distant ones black. Heavy clouds cast stains upon the deep blue of the sky," he reports in his lyrical essay The Desert, collected in Albert Camus: Selected Essays and Notebooks, edited and translated by Philip Thody (Peregrine, 1970).
"As the afternoon drew to its close, there came a silver light in which everything fell silent. The top of the hills had first of all been shrouded in clouds. But a breeze had risen whose breath I could feel on my cheek. As it blew, the clouds behind the mountains drew apart like the two sides of a curtain. At the same time the cypress-trees on the summit seemed to shoot up in a single jet against the sudden blue of the sky. With them, the whole hillside and landscape of stones and olive trees rose slowly back into sight. Other clouds came. The curtain closed. And the hill with its cypress-trees and houses vanished anew."
The clouds parted again. "As the world thus filled and emptied its lungs, the same breath ceased a few seconds away and then, far off, resumed the theme of a fugue which stone and air composed on the world's scale. Each time, the theme was repeated in a slightly lower key."