Thus in that lifeless November the giant seemed lost in a white trance. If we are vivid in springtime, in autumn we wish for sleep and dreams. A vagueness is the nature of the falling year. Up above, in space, great deep clouds expanded gradually. They dragged themselves along in languor, while their slow shadows darkened the moist earth and climbed the stripped branches of the giant pine. In this misty autumnal afternoon against its sad background all movement seemed slack. A formless but dreamy instinct seemed implicit in animals and plants and things. The minutes ticked off lazily in the unearthly gleaming half-light, in this soft and yet magical atmosphere above which the giant seemed to hang its head in reverie. Its relaxed needles, weeping boughs and lined rugged trunk made up a mournful-seeming disappointed whole. There was not a breath nor a whisper in the air. Every shape, every colour, every scent, each withering blade of grass supine on the earth, each pebble on the plain, each ripple of light or trembling shadow seemed to give off a similar emanation, a dull slow tonelessness which permeated the toneless air, above, below, about. In one huge fissure of the bole slept a bear, made torpid by the close thick weather. On the ground near the foot of the tree in a tuft of dried grass a dog was sleeping, the dim gaze of its half-open eyes veiled and turned inward. Beside it on a raised turf sat a great insect, the hardly visible vibration of whose wings seemed pensive too. Farther away, but within sight from the tree-top, stood a hut whose people lay silently watching the great clouds pass. They also were dreaming or thinking, allowing the whims of the spirit born of this declining season to play over what had been or what yet might be. It would seem as though rare influences of all that is incomprehensible and infinite in space, of the chaotic and inconceivable in time, were sometimes allowed to echo down upon things alive and things lifeless, and to swing them in a general and harmonious way. Nature moves on for ever, sleeplessly and untiringly, but from time to time the past seems to bode forward in brief uncertain fashion, casting lights and shadows across the loom of the present. The adamant Now may keep no trace of the dead Then, but the ripples of the past none the less persist in ever-failing widening rings, which pass out into the abyss as ghost-memories: and these, falling sometimes upon the bark of a tree, or upon the nature of a man, or the mind of a dog, or into a sea or a perfume or the half-light of a dewy evening, evoke dreams and clothe the formless with apparent form that it may have relation with material men and things. CHAPTER 11 _The Wheel of Life Lived_