| [00:01.080] |
--- lesson 57 Back in the old country |
| [00:06.600] |
--- Listen to the tape then answer the question below. |
| [00:12.160] |
--- Did the narrator find his mother's grave? |
| [00:17.760] |
I stopped to let the car cool off and to study the map. |
| [00:22.360] |
I had expected to be near my objective by now, but everything still seemed alien to me. |
| [00:28.720] |
I was only five when my father had taken me abroad, and that was eighteen years ago. |
| [00:35.400] |
When my mother had died after a tragic accident, he did not quickly recover from the shock and loneliness. |
| [00:43.040] |
Everything around him was full of her presence, continually reopening the wound. |
| [00:49.160] |
So he decided to emigrate. |
| [00:51.720] |
In the new country he became absorbed in making a new life for the two of us, so that he gradually ceased to grieve. |
| [01:00.120] |
He did not marry again and I was brought up without a woman's care; |
| [01:05.160] |
but I lacked for nothing, for he was both father and mother to me. |
| [01:10.280] |
He always meant to go back one day, but not to stay. |
| [01:14.440] |
His roots and mine bad become too firmly embedded in the new land. |
| [01:19.640] |
But he wanted to see the old folk again and to visit my mother's grave. |
| [01:24.800] |
He became mortally ill a few months before we had planned to go and, when he knew that he was dying, he made me promise to go on my own. |
| [01:34.400] |
I hired a car the day after landing and bought a comprehensive book of maps, |
| [01:40.040] |
which I found most helpful on the cross-country journey, but which I did not think I should need on the last stage. |
| [01:47.640] |
It was not that I actually remembered anything at all. |
| [01:50.960] |
But my father had described over and over again what we should see at every milestone, after leaving the nearest town, |
| [01:59.680] |
so that I was positive I should recognize it as familiar territory. |
| [02:04.480] |
Well, I had been wrong, for I was now lost. |
| [02:09.480] |
I looked at the map and then at the milometer. |
| [02:13.240] |
I had come ten miles since leaving the town,^从小镇出来，我走了10英里。 |
| [02:16.640] |
and at this point, according to my father, I should be looking at farms and cottages in a valley, |
| [02:23.360] |
with the spire of the church of our village showing in the far distance. |
| [02:28.040] |
I could see no valley, no farms, no cottages and no church spire -- only a lake. |
| [02:36.360] |
I decided that I must have taken a wrong turning somewhere. |
| [02:40.640] |
So I drove back to the town and began to retrace the route, taking frequent glances at the map. |
| [02:47.800] |
I landed up at the same corner. |
| [02:51.000] |
The curious thing was that the lake was not marked on the map. |
| [02:55.840] |
I felt as if I had stumbled into a nightmare country, as you sometimes do in dreams. |
| [03:02.160] |
And, as in a nightmare, there was nobody in sight to help me. |
| [03:06.720] |
Fortunately for me, as I was wondering what to do next, there appeared on the horizon a man on horseback, riding in my direction. |
| [03:16.320] |
I waited till he came near, then I asked him the way to our old village. |
| [03:22.160] |
He said that there was now no village. |
| [03:25.600] |
I thought he must have misunderstood me, so I repeated its name. |
| [03:30.480] |
This time he pointed to the lake. |
| [03:33.600] |
The village no longer existed because it had been submerged, and all the valley too. |
| [03:41.000] |
The lake was not a natural one, but a man-made reservoir. |
