《新版新概念英语第三册(英音)Lesson (57)》歌词

[00:00:01] --- lesson 57 back in the old country

[00:00:06] --- listen to the tape then answer the question below.

[00:00:12] --- did the narrator find his mother's grave?

[00:00:17] i stopped to let the car cool off and to study the map.

[00:00:22] i had expected to be near my objective by now, but everything still seemed alien to me.

[00:00:28] i was only five when my father had taken me abroad, and that was eighteen years ago.

[00:00:35] when my mother had died after a tragic accident, he did not quickly recover from the shock and loneliness.

[00:00:43] everything around him was full of her presence, continually reopening the wound.

[00:00:49] so he decided to emigrate.

[00:00:51] in the new country he became absorbed in making a new life for the two of us, so that he gradually ceased to grieve.

[00:01:00] he did not marry again and i was brought up without a woman's care;

[00:01:05] but i lacked for nothing, for he was both father and mother to me.

[00:01:10] he always meant to go back one day, but not to stay.

[00:01:14] his roots and mine bad become too firmly embedded in the new land.

[00:01:19] but he wanted to see the old folk again and to visit my mother's grave.

[00:01:24] 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.

[00:01:34] i hired a car the day after landing and bought a comprehensive book of maps,

[00:01:40] which i found most helpful on the cross-country journey, but which i did not think i should need on the last stage.

[00:01:47] it was not that i actually remembered anything at all.

[00:01:50] but my father had described over and over again what we should see at every milestone, after leaving the nearest town,

[00:01:59] so that i was positive i should recognize it as familiar territory.

[00:02:04] well, i had been wrong, for i was now lost.

[00:02:09] i looked at the map and then at the milometer.

[00:02:13] i had come ten miles since leaving the town,^从小镇出来，我走了10英里。

[00:02:16] and at this point, according to my father, i should be looking at farms and cottages in a valley,

[00:02:23] with the spire of the church of our village showing in the far distance.

[00:02:28] i could see no valley, no farms, no cottages and no church spire -- only a lake.

[00:02:36] i decided that i must have taken a wrong turning somewhere.

[00:02:40] so i drove back to the town and began to retrace the route, taking frequent glances at the map.

[00:02:47] i landed up at the same corner.

[00:02:51] the curious thing was that the lake was not marked on the map.

[00:02:55] i felt as if i had stumbled into a nightmare country, as you sometimes do in dreams.

[00:03:02] and, as in a nightmare, there was nobody in sight to help me.

[00:03:06] fortunately for me, as i was wondering what to do next, there appeared on the horizon a man on horseback, riding in my direction.

[00:03:16] i waited till he came near, then i asked him the way to our old village.

[00:03:22] he said that there was now no village.

[00:03:25] i thought he must have misunderstood me, so i repeated its name.

[00:03:30] this time he pointed to the lake.

[00:03:33] the village no longer existed because it had been submerged, and all the valley too.

[00:03:41] the lake was not a natural one, but a man-made reservoir.