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7

There was a sound in the night What was it like?

The giant bass drue as the Italian players announced the little drareat bass druh the street of the town during those precious days when I, the runaway boy, had been one of the of a cannon echoing through valleys and mountain passes? I felt it in my bones I openednearer

The rhyth? The world was filled with the sound

It was a great ominous din that drew closer and closer And yet so athat rattled the china on its shelf or the glass s Or ypt lies in silence Silence covers the desert on both sides of the hty river There is not even the bleat of sheep or the lowing of cattle Or a wo, this sound

For one second I was afraid I stretched in the earth I forced htless, I was floating in the soil, and I couldn’t breathe suddenly, I couldn’t scream, and it seemed that if I could have screalass for oblets would have been blown to bits, s exploded

The sound was louder, nearer I tried to roll over and to gain the air but I couldn’t

And it seeli, this sound, some creature so powerful that even in the silence the trees and the flowers and the air itself did feel it The dumb creatures of the earth did know The ver out of its path

Maybe this is death, I thought

Maybe by some sublime miracle it is alive, Death, and it takes us into its ar, it is the very personification of the heavens

And we rise up and up into the stars with it We go past the angels and the saints, past illumination itself and into the divine darkness, into the void, as we pass out of existence In oblivion we are forgiven all things

The destruction of Nicki becoht The death of reat peace of the inevitable

I pushed at the soil I kicked at it, but s were too weak I tasted the sandy mud inain like the roar of artillery: the cannon boom

And quite co forlike a beaht I couldn’t lie here anymore I had to answer

I sent it the wildest current of welcome I told it I was here, and I heard led tothrough every fiber ofwith it around me

Whatever it was, it had come into the burnt-out ruined house

The door had been broken away, as if the hinges had been anchored not in iron but in plaster I saw all this against the backdrop ofunder the olive trees It was in the garden

In a frenzy again I clawed towards the air But the low, coh the sand fro soft like velvet brush leam of the dark sky and the drift of the clouds like a veil over the stars, and never had the heavens in all their sis filled with air