rs into my head. He murmurs that logic
is a thing of terrible chains, and that all things cling together. He
utters sentences from which distinct words spring, like the scattered
hasty gleams they include in hymns--the Bible, history, majesty, folly.
Then he shouts:--

"There is nothing in the world but the Empire's glory!"

His cry shakes some of the motionless reefs. And I, like an invincible
echo, I cry:--

"There is only the glory of France!"

I do not know if I did really cry out, and if our words did collide in
the night's horror. His head is quite bare. His slender neck and
bird-like profile issue from a fur collar. There are things like owls
shining on his breast. It seems to me as if silence is digging itself
into the brains and lungs of the dark prisoners who imprison us, and
that we are listening to it.

He rambles more loudly now, as if he bore a stifling secret; he calls
up multitudes, and still more multitudes. He is obsessed by
multitudes--"Men, men!" he says. The soil is caressed by some sounds
of sighs, terribly soft, by confidences which are interchanged without
their wishing it. Now and again, the sky collapses into light, and
that flash of instantaneous sunshine changes the shape of the plain
every time, according to its direction. Then does the night take all
back again athwart the rolling echoes.

"Men! Men!"

"What about them, then?" says a sudden jeering voice which falls like a
stone.

"Men _must_ not awake," the shining shadow goes on, in dull and hollow
tones.

"Don't worry!" says the ironical voice, and at that moment it terrifies
me.

Several bodies arise on their fists into the darkness--I see them by
their heavy groans--and look around them.

The shadow talks to himself and repeats his insane words:--

"Men _must_ not awake."

The voice opposite me, capsizing in laughter and swollen with a rattle,
says again:--

"Don't worry!"

Yonder, in the hemisphere of night, comets glide, blending their cries
of engines and owls with their flaming entrails. Will the sky ever
recover the huge peace of the sun and the stainless blue?

A little order, a little lucidity are coming back into my mind. Then I
begin to think about myself.

Am I going to die, yes or no? Where can I be wounded? I have managed
to look at my hands, one by one; they are not dead, and I saw nothing
in their dark trickling. It is extraordinary to be made motionless
like this, without knowing