The trench had at once slipped back into its earlier composure. The dusk was now creeping down the hill; with every stir of the breeze more stars were blown into the sky; the oak was all black now like a friendly shadow protecting me. "There'll be no more for a while," said the Colonel. He was right. There was stillness; no battery, however distant, no pitter-patter of rifle fire, no chattering report of the machine guns. Men began to cross the yard, slowly, without caution. The dusk caught us so that I could not see the Colonel's face; a stream that cut the field, hidden in the day, was now suddenly revealed by a grinning careless moon. Then a soldier crossed the yard to us, told us that Dr. Semyonov wished us to start and had sent us a guide; the wagons were ready. At that instant, whence I know not, for the first time that day, excitement leapt upon me. Events had hitherto passed before me like the shadowed film of a cinematograph; it had been as though some one had given me glimpses of a life, an adventure, a country with which I should later have some concern but whose boundaries I was not yet to cross. Now, suddenly, whether it was because of the dark and the silence I cannot say, I had become, myself, an actor in the affair. It was not simply that we were given something definite to do--we had had wounded during the morning--it was rather that, as in the children's game we were "hot," we had drawn in a moment close to some one or something of whose presence we were quite distinctly aware. As we walked across the yard into the long low field, speaking in whispers, watching a shaft of light, perhaps some distant projector that trembled in pale white shadows on the horizon, we seemed to me to be, in actual truth, the hunters of Trenchard's dream.