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.
