You have to admire it, first as a piece of reportage; prose clear as the mountain air. The writer tells of a long journey on foot through the uplands where the Alps extend into Provence. He is walking through a deserted region, above 1,200 metres, and finds himself "in a landscape of unparalleled desolation." Everywhere dry land; he needed to drink and saw a lone figure - a shepherd who led him to a spring.
He was to spend the night in the shepherd's house, and partook of his hospitality. After eating, the shepherd emptied a pile of acorns on to the table and carefully picked through them. He counted one hundred sound ones, rejecting any that were less than perfect. Next morning after letting his sheep out of the fold, he took his stick, which was in fact a steel rod, and set out, the writer with him.
When he reached the place he wanted, the shepherd began making holes in the ground with his rod, planting in each an acorn. Was the land his? No, he didn't know to whom it belonged, it might have been common land. And he planted his hundred acorns. After the midday meal he started sorting more acorns to sow. The writer put a question to him which he answered. He'd expected to lose more to rodents or some other how. Still, ten thousand would grow where before there had been nothing.
This was Elzeard Bouffier. To the writer's remark about how magnificent his ten thousand oaks would be in thirty years time, the shepherd answered that if God spared him, he'd have planted so many other trees in those thirty years, the ten thousand trees would just be a drop in the ocean. This is, of course from Jean Giono's book The Man Who Planted Trees and it goes on to tell of the blooming of this arid country as forests grew. Ultimately, water flowed in steams which had been dry in human memory: flowers grew in the new meadows, life returned to villagers that had been moribund - through it took decades . . .
It reads like nature reporting. It is in fact a wonderful fable. Here we have the English elegant version from Harvill Press, the Gallimard version with colour illustrations and, not the least, An Fear A Chureadh Crainne, from An Gum.
A world book. If you haven't got it, look it out. Small, short, yet powerful.