MS-BRML-NWWR-22-546

[0231] was A one day at one place, then B another at another, then a
third the rock and I, and so on for the other components,
the cows, the sky, the sea, the mountains. [0232] I can't believe it.

[0233] No, I will not lie, I can easily conceive it. [0234] No matter, no matter,
let us go on, as if all arose from one and the same weariness,
on and on hoarding, until there is no room, no light, for anymore.
[0235] What is certain is that the man with the stick did not pass by
again that night, because I would have heard him, if he had.
[0236] I don't say I would have seen him, I say i would have heard him.

[0237] I sleep little and that little in the daytime. [0238] Oh not systematically,
in my life without end i have dabbled with every kind of sleep, but
at the time now coming back to me i took my doze in the daytime and,
what is more, in the morning. [0239] Let me hear nothing of the moon, in
my night there is no moon, and if it happens that I speak of the
stars it's inadvertently.

[0240] Now of all the noises that night not one
was of those heavy uncertain steps, or of that club with which he
sometimes smote the earth until it quaked. [0241] How agreeable it is to be
confirmed, after a more or less long period of vacillation, in one's
first impressions. [0242] Perhaps that is what tempers the pangs of death.

[0243] Not that i was so conclusively, I mean confirmed, in my first im-
pressions with regard to — ^{[place = inline] []} wait — ^{[place = inline] []} C. [0244] For the wagons and carts
which a little before dawn went thundering by, on their way to market
with fruit, eggs, butter ^{[place = inline] ,} and perhaps cheese, in one of these perhaps
he would have been found, overcome by fatigue or by discouragement,
perhaps even dead.

[0245] Or he might have gone back to the town by another
way too far away for me to hear its sounds, or by little paths through
the fields, crushing the silent grass, pounding the silent ground. [0246] And