It was mid-day in Eden. The great snake hung in the branches of the apple-tree, watching Adam and Eve, with dull, malignant eyes half-closed. He had shed his skin which hung from one of the branches, swaying idly in the wind, like a piece of grey ravelled lace; and the great snake coiled about the trunk shone with renewed splendour, like a bronze in which the colours of olive and red are graduated so as to mix and flow into each other through imperceptible shades of difference. The shadow of some domestic quarrel hung over Adam and Eve; he was moved by an ungracious solicitude for her comfort, and she received his attentions in offended humility. The snake watched the comedy with narrow eyes; subtilty of enjoyment increasing the malign persistence of his stare.
"I am unhappy," said Eve.
"It is because we have done wrong," said Adam.
"Let us go out into the desert. I do not like this place. The water is not good; the air is heavy; it is a morass; the home of frogs and the abode of scorpions. At night I lie awake, looking through the door of our cabin, and I see the moonlight lying upon the water, and I hear a chorus of frogs; all night I hear the croaking of the frogs. It will make me mad."
"Last night you crept into my arms and slept like a child," said Adam. "You did not stir all night; but I lay awake looking at the moonlight and listening to the frogs. They chanted a spell to fill my soul with terror, and the moon also was full of evil. Then the whole earth dissolved like a dream, and the stars vanished as things that slip through water; and I seemed to be falling, falling through an endless sea of moonlight, falling towards the moon, and beyond the moon there was nothing; but I felt you in mine arms, and I did not dare to move, lest you, too, should vanish with the world. This vision was sent to me by God that I might learn how unsubstantial is the world, as if it were but the shadow of His thought, a dream within a dream."
"Do not let us talk of it," said Eve, trembling. "Perhaps if I had not been here you would have fallen into nothing. It was because you held me that you did not fall. This place will make me mad. Why are the leaves falling from the trees?"
"I do not know."
"The palm-trees in the desert do not lose their leaves. My heart is sick for the palm-trees in the desert with the little slender moon shining above them, and shining at the bottom of the deep wells. My heart is sick for the song of the nightingales. Why have the tops of the mountains turned white?"
"I do not know," answered Adam; "but once I saw from the desert a range of mountains, and their tops were white. They also had trees; but the leaves of the trees did not fall. These trees must be dead. Some great unhappiness is come upon the world. Last night I was cold."