'WHAT OF THE night?' they ask. No answer comes. For the blind Time gropes in a maze and knows not its path or purpose. The darkness in the valley stares like the dead eye-sockets of a giant, the clouds like a nightmare oppress the sky, and the massive shadows lie scattered like the torn limbs of the night. A lurid glow waxes and wanes on the horizon, is it an ultimate threat from an alien-star, or an elemental hunger licking the sky? Things are deliriously wild, they are a noise whose grammar is a groan, and words smothered out of shape and sense. They are the refuse, the rejections, the fruitless failures of life, abrupt ruins of prodigal pride, fragments of a bridge over the oblivion Of a vanished stream, godless shrines that shelter reptiles, marble steps that lead to blankness. Sudden tumults rise in the sky and wrestle and a startled shudder runs along the sleepless hours. Are they from desperate floods hammering against their cave walls, or from some fanatic storms whirling and howling incantations? Are they the cry of an ancient forest flinging up its hoarded fire in a last extravagant suicide, or screams of a paralytic crowd scourged by lunatics blind and deaf? Underneath the noisy terror a stealthy hum creeps up like bubbling volcanic mud, a mixture of sinister whispers, rumours and slanders, and hisses of derision. The men gathered there are vague like torn pages of an epic. Groping in groups or single, their torchlight tattoos their faces in chequered lines, in patterns of frightfulness. The maniacs suddenly strike their neighbours on suspicion and a hubbub of an indiscriminate fight bursts forth echoing from hill to hill. The women weep and wail, they cry that their children are lost in a wilderness of contrary paths with confusion at the end. Others defiantly ribald shake with raucous laughter their lascivious limbs unshrinkingly loud, for they think that nothing matters.
