SUB UMBRA
Sometimes in the night-time Gilliatt woke and peered into the darkness.
He felt a strange emotion.
His eyes were opened upon the black night; the situation was dismal; full of disquietude.
There is such a thing as the pressure of darkness.
A strange roof of shadow; a deep obscurity, which no diver can explore; a light mingled with that obscurity, of a strange, subdued, and sombre kind; floating atoms of rays, like a dust of seeds or of ashes; millions of lamps, but no illumining; a vast sprinkling of fire, of which no man knows the secret; a diffusion of shining points, like a drift of sparks arrested in their course; the disorder of the whirlwind, with the fixedness of death; a mysterious and abyssmal depth; an enigma, at once showing and concealing its face; the Infinite in its mask of darkness—these are the synonyms of night. Its weight lies heavily on the soul of man.
This union of all mysteries—the mystery of the Cosmos and the mystery of Fate—oppresses human reason.
The pressure of darkness acts in inverse proportion upon different kinds of natures. In the presence of night man feels his own incompleteness. He perceives the dark void and is sensible of infirmity. It is like the vacancy of blindness. Face to face with night, man bends, kneels, prostrates himself, crouches on the earth, crawls towards a cave, or seeks for wings. Almost always he shrinks from that vague presence of the Infinite Unknown. He asks himself what it is; he trembles and bows the head. Sometimes he desires to go to it.
To go whither?
He can only answer, “Yonder.”