I found a bridge which crossed the deep ravine they had told me of.
This high bridge was new, and had been built of fine stone, yet it was
broken and ruined, and a gap suddenly showed in the dark. I stepped
back from it in fear. The clambering down to the stream and up again
through the briars to regain the road broke me yet more, and when, on
the hill beyond, I saw the tower faintly darker against the dark sky,
I went up doggedly to it, fearing faintness, and reaching it where it
stood (it was on the highest ground overlooking the Secchia valley), I
sat down on a stone beside it and waited for the morning.
The long slope of the hills fell away for miles to where, by daylight,
would have lain the misty plain of Emilia. The darkness confused the
landscape. The silence of the mountains and the awful solemnity of the
place lent that vast panorama a sense of the terrible, under the dizzy
roof of the stars. Every now and again some animal of the night gave a
cry in the undergrowth of the valley, and the great rock of
Castel-Nuovo, now close and enormous - bare, rugged, a desert
place - added something of doom.
The hours were creeping on with the less certain stars; a very faint
and unliving grey touched the edges of the clouds. The cold possessed
me, and I rose to walk, if I could walk, a little farther.
What is that in the mind which, after (it may be) a slight
disappointment or a petty accident, causes it to suffer on the scale
of grave things?
I have waited for the dawn a hundred times, attended by that mournful,
colourless spirit which haunts the last hours of darkness; and
influenced especially by the great timeless apathy that hangs round
the first uncertain promise of increasing light. For there is an hour
before daylight when men die, and when there is nothing above the soul
or around it, when even the stars fail.
And this long and dreadful expectation I had thought to be worst when
one was alone at sea in a small boat without wind; drifting beyond
one's harbour in the ebb of the outer channel tide, and sogging back
at the first flow on the broad, confused movement of a sea without any
waves. In such lonely mornings I have watched the Owers light turning,
and I have counted up my gulf of time, and wondered that moments could
be so stretched out in the clueless mind. I have prayed for the
morning or for a little draught of wind, and this I have thought, I
say, the extreme of absorption into emptiness and longing.
