Silence.... Twilight within us is falling also. To admit it we watch the surrounding dusk with swelling chests and quivering nostrils.
On the rising ground opposite a yellow point is kindled, another and another, performing an unconscious duty—to usher in the night. And night is now here. Close by, in the fields, she has already drowned the olive-trees, which have no compact mass to offer in resistance, scarcely even any outlines, defenseless, except for their hundred-year-old trunks. Their life is a thing of quivering, silvery breezes, and when the darkness comes slinking and whispering, a breath will lull their gray-lined brows to sleep.
Along the embankment on either side of the road, trees—you can't tell what sort of trees any more—make great human gestures, as if to give warning of a drama about to begin. Instinctively we quicken our pace and draw closer together. The rich blood runs lively in our veins. We share a fleeting warmth.
And now noises spring up, noises that belong to night alone and are a part of its peacefulness; mournful bayings, which echo throws back faithfully from yon slope; the croaking of the frogs, which blight the heart of the atmosphere; a human call now and then, direct and piercing, and from the ground the metallic chirping of the crickets.
How at ease you feel, full of loving-kindness, and how sincere you are. You have sins lurking in your flesh, crimes piled up in your brain, a sombre mood inhabiting your heart. Everything can be confessed and laid bare. The night is all-comprehending. Night-time is different from the stiffly starched daytime with its color and form to distract man from his intimate verity. You can venture upon the wildest thoughts, expand to your uttermost limits, forget your own existence, and discard all past gestures. They were all inadequate. You don't want to retain any of them except the gesture you would make here—spread your arms while walking and hold your hands open like two pure, empty chalices.
Complete blackness now. You can no longer distinguish between silence and space, fear and the rustling; all things are merged in each other, trees with trees, their masses with the slope, and the slope, deprived of its contours, with the sky, which has come down to join the earth. Everything is blended, obliterated. The very cypresses, during the daytime a spear thrust at the azure, are also added to the darkness.
Beneath our eyes, tired from not seeing anything, the road kindly extends its vaporous pallor. Except for the road no line to arrest the impulse within, no perspective. The only clear things, our own figures.
We have never before entered such solitude together, nor ever before been laid so bare to each other. It makes us walk slowly and solemnly, as if we were passing beneath the eye of God.
The idea of us as a couple. We. We two.