The woods by night, in all their uncanny effect, are not rightly to
be understood until you can compare
Them with the woods by day.
The stillness of the medium, the floor of glittering sand, these
trees that go streaming up like monstrous sea-weeds and waver in
the moving winds like the weeds in submarine currents, all these
set the mind working on the thought of what you may have seen off a
foreland or over the side of a boat, and make you feel like a
diver, down in the quiet water, fathoms below the tumbling,
transitory surface of the sea. And yet in itself, as I say, the
strangeness of these nocturnal solitudes is not to be felt fully
without the sense of contrast. You must have risen in the morning
and seen the woods as they are by day, kindled and coloured in the
sun's light; you must have felt the odour of innumerable trees at
even, the unsparing heat along the forest roads, and the coolness
of the groves.
And on the first morning you will doubtless rise betimes. If you
have not been wakened before by the visit of some adventurous
pigeon, you will be wakened as soon as the sun can reach your
window - for there are no blind or shutters to keep him out - and the
room, with its bare wood floor and bare whitewashed walls, shines
all round you in a sort of glory of reflected lights. You may doze
a while longer by snatches, or lie awake to study the charcoal men
and dogs and horses with which former occupants have defiled the
partitions:
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