The animal's start has altered my place and shot me on my side, nearer still to the man who was talking. He has unbent, and is lying on his back. Thus he offers his face like a mirror to the moon's pallor, and shows hideously that he is wounded in the neck. I feel that he is going to die. His words are hardly more now than the rustle of wings. He has said some unintelligible things about a Spanish painter, and some motionless portraits in the palaces--the Escurial, Spain, Europe. Suddenly he is repelling with violence some beings who are in his past:-- "Begone, you dreamers!" he says, louder than the stormy sky where the flames are red as blood, louder than the falling flashes and the harrowing wind, louder than all the night which enshrouds us and yet continues to stone us. He is seized with a frenzy which bares his soul as naked as his neck:-- "The truth is revolutionary," gasps the nocturnal voice; "get you gone, you men of truth, you who cast disorder among ignorance, you who strew words and sow the wind; you contrivers, begone! You bring in the reign of men! But the multitude hates you and mocks you!" He laughs, as if he heard the multitude's laughter. And around us another burst of convulsive laughter grows hugely bigger in the plain's black heart:-- "Wot's 'e sayin' now, that chap?" "Let him be. You can see 'e knows more'n 'e says." "Ah, la, la!" I am so near to him that I alone gather the rest of his voice, and he says to me very quietly:-- "I have confidence in the abyss of the people." And those words stabbed me to the heart and dilated my eyes with horror, for it seemed to me suddenly, in a flash, that he understood what he was saying! A picture comes to life before my eyes--that prince, whom I saw from below, once upon a time, in the nightmare of life, he who loved the blood of the chase. Not far away a shell turns the darkness upside down; and it seems as if that explosion also has considered and shrieked. Heavy night is implanted everywhere around us. My hands are bathed in black blood. On my neck and cheeks, rain, which is also black, bleeds. The funeral procession of silver-fringed clouds goes by once more, and again a ray of moonlight besilvers the swamp that has sunk us soldiers; it lays winding-sheets on the prone. All at once a swelling lamentation comes to life, one knows not where, and glides over the plain:-- "Help! Help!" "Now then! _They're_ not coming to look for us! What about it?" And I see a stirring and movement, very gentle, as at the bottom of the sea. Amid the glut of noises, upon that still tepid and unsubmissive expanse where cold death sits brooding, that sharp profile has fallen back. The cloak is quivering. The great and sumptuous bird of prey is in the act of taking wing.