It was very dark: in the atmosphere, thrilled with a dreary and ominous agitation, they were aware of a dull eerie motion, of strange indefinite vibrations, of vague fearful mutterings and lurking shapes that had no shape! Sometimes, on a sudden, feebly gleaming from out the voluminous dusk, there appeared the spectral pallor of the snow-fields; and a few glimmers—chilly, moist, viscous glimmers—would coil and uncoil in snaky folds across the shadows; and again the night would shut her eyelids fast, and the darkness descended with a black impenetrable downpour, in which all things were lost. The eye, no longer able to perceive anything, now sounded the uttermost abyss of this portentous invisibility, whose dull sepulchral deadness benumbed and overwhelmed the mind.—But at times the veil of obscurity was rent in twain, as by some mighty force, and through that tremendous rift one could see the black-hue expanse of heaven, serene and studded with stars. And now—was it from fields or from huts? from the sky above, or from the gloom-drowned horizons?—who can say? ... but there came ... trembling ... muttering ... slinking ... what? voices, gleams, scarce audible echoes—call them what you will: the ghosts of things and sounds long ago dead and gone, now haunting the world again, seemed moving to and fro in a ghastly procession, expiring far away, as the light of a star may expire in the abyss. But these two paid little heed to all this. Within them there raged a tempest; every minute it grew and grew, rolling from heart to heart in a hurricane of hot unspoken desires, of flashing glances, of shuddering pangs, of scorching kisses, of words as stammering and incoherent and inarticulate as is the thunder in the sky: of instants as mute as death, of fondness so excruciating that they choked each other with caresses, and their hugs gave them intense pain, while they struggled to hurt and to be hurt for the delight of that pain; and their eyes filmed over, and they could no longer see anything at all! Swept onward by the wild blast of their passion, blinded to everything, maddened even to frenzy, forgetful of all, and burning with the same mutual flame, they had, in that night of palpable darkness, fled out into the loneliness of the silent waste, about to give themselves to each other entirely, “till death did them part,” and from the very bottom of their souls that were starving with the insatiable hunger of unfulfilled desire.