It Was Perhaps Ten O'clock,
And The Sky Was Open And Glorious With Stars.
I climbed up a bank on
my right, and searching for a place to lie found one under a tree near
a great telegraph pole.
Here was a little parched grass, and one could
lie there and see the lake and wait for sleep. It was a benediction to
stretch out all supported by the dry earth, with my little side-bag
for pillow, and to look at the clear night above the hills, and to
listen to the very distant music, and to wonder whether or not, in
this strange southern country, there might not be snakes gliding about
in the undergrowth. Caught in such a skein of influence I was soothed
and fell asleep.
For a little while I slept dreamlessly.
Just so much of my living self remained as can know, without
understanding, the air around. It is the life of trees. That
under-part, the barely conscious base of nature which trees and
sleeping men are sunk in, is not only dominated by an immeasurable
calm, but is also beyond all expression contented. And in its very
stuff there is a complete and changeless joy. This is surely what the
great mind meant when it said to the Athenian judges that death must
not be dreaded since no experience in life was so pleasurable as a
deep sleep; for being wise and seeing the intercommunion of things, he
could not mean extinction, which is nonsense, but a lapse into that
under-part of which I speak. For there are gods also below the earth.
But a dream came into my sleep and disturbed me, increasing life, and
therefore bringing pain. I dreamt that I was arguing, at first easily,
then violently, with another man. More and more he pressed me, and at
last in my dream there were clearly spoken words, and he said to me,
'You must be wrong, because you are so cold; if you were right you
would not be so cold.' And this argument seemed quite reasonable to me
in my foolish dream, and I muttered to him, 'You are right, I must be
in the wrong. It is very cold ...' Then I half opened my eyes and saw
the telegraph pole, the trees, and the lake. Far up the lake, where
the Italian Frontier cuts it, the torpedo-boats, looking for
smugglers, were casting their search-lights. One of the roving beams
fell full on me and I became broad awake. I stood up. It was indeed
cold, with a kind of clinging and grasping chill that was not to be
expressed in degrees of heat, but in dampness perhaps, or perhaps in
some subtler influence of the air.
I sat on the bank and gazed at the lake in some despair. Certainly I
could not sleep again without a covering cloth, and it was now past
midnight, nor did I know of any house, whether if I took the road I
should find one in a mile, or in two, or in five.
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