MS-WU-MSS008-3-50-1

[0231] 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 heaping up and up, until there is
no room, no light, for any more.

[0235] What is certain is that the man
with the stick did not pass by again that night, because I would
ha^vve 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 by
day. [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 is by mistake. [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 a^greeable 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 impressions with regard
to – wait – C. [0244] For the wagons and carts which a little before
dawn went thundering by, on their way to market with fruit, eggs,
butter and perhaps cheese, in one of these perhaps he would have
been found, overcome by fatigue or 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