Ever since dawn the track had followed the hillside across a tangle of bamboos and elephant grass in which horse and rider sometimes disappeared entirely; then the Jesuit's head would reappear above the yellow sea, with his big bony nose set above virile and smiling lips, and with those piercing eyes that carried in them far more suggestion of limitless horizons than of the pages of a breviary. His stature was ill suited to the proportions of the Kirdi pony which served him as a mount; his legs formed an uncomfortable angle under his cassock, in stirrups much too short for him, and he sometimes swayed dangerously in his saddle as he observed, with abrupt movements of his conquistador profile, the landscape of the Oule mountains, in which it was difficult not to sense a certain air of happiness.
- From The Roots of Heaven by Romain Gary
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