Meanwhile there were showering down on earth the beams of that moon, mirror and transmitter of the sun, which conveys to us its light without its heat. From the distance came the splashing of water: and on the river bank, where it was nearest to the tree and within sight, lay a man and woman. They were naked, and the water was dripping slowly from their bronzed bodies. They lay aside by side, and the low murmur of their voices and their stifled kisses filled the near air about. Beyond and around them eddied the confused noises of the fields and woods, the scents of evening made lively by the cool damp air, the brightness of the moon's shining on the silvan landscape, a selection of all the sounds and shapes and tints and flavours in the world. The contagion of universal love had caught the lovers, making their eyes hard, their blood hot, their lips red. The everlasting universal thrill which makes the flowers burst into bloom, which makes the insects glitter and the birds sing, was upon these two, flinging them into a mutual passionate embrace. They were just another instance of the immortal lust of conjoined sexes. Their sighs rustled between their lips like the wind in the grass, they sobbed together like the breaking sea, their flesh tingled with their blood as did the fibres of the forest giant with sap. Their inchoate and always unfulfilled desires took wing in the clear blue evening and became part of the immense and complex harmony of a thousand strains which has reigned since the beginning of the worlds, in the ether, to the stars, about the stars, beyond them, even to the confines of illimitable space. The great pine-tree in its six thousand years had many times seen substances mating and beings marrying, and was able to record that these two young naked humans were exactly like the thousands of other couples whose loves it had witnessed since that distant time when as a tender plant it had pushed its shy and timid way towards the blue. For sixty centuries generation of man had succeeded generation beneath the tree, but whatever differences there might have been in their external circumstances or in the superficial accessories of their state, always when in love their couples used to embrace naked on such spring evenings as this, with the same ceremony and as ecstatically as the pair to-day. The forest giant from its lofty crest was thus able to establish that mankind had remained essentially the same through the six thousand years.