The heavy sun pressed down; heat smote upward from the water-shimmering road. The hot sun numbed the mind; cool rushes of green shade revived. A warm breeze stifled in the solid trees. All sound was dry. A fume of summer coiled upon the fields.
Blind cars had made their kill. Many birds lay shattered in the road: blackbirds, thrushes, and starlings, were pulped and flattened in the sanded tar. A rat, a mole, and a rabbit, had been reduced to rusty stain. Traffic made the insects rise. Swifts came down to feed, cutting between cars, bouncing in the hot metallic glare. Low down in front of wheels the thin dark shapes cut through. Fifty miles an hour was simple to them; merely the speed they started from. Like black-ripping many-bladed knives, they flung ahead, crisping across windscreens, blurring into light, unseen, untouched, gathering their prey. The insects that were left were smashed to green haze upon the heated glass.
The cool, quiet river was relief. The hot snarl of the distant road was soothed away. Slender damsel-flies, dark blue points of light, were hovering in the sharp green reeds. Something like a wisp of smoke – but it was not smoke – five feet high, and twirling, came quickly through the tall grass. It was like a thin mist rising. Grass bent before it. There was a hissing. Trees leaned away, and leaves moved frantically. Then the silvery spiral died into the river. It was a whirlwind, created by the heat, and sent spinning across fields to find its water-quenching.
Under willows, among the close-growing yellow stems of tall, tufted reeds, a reed warbler sang. His small, soft body trembled with the sound. His frail legs were splayed apart, each spidery foot clinging to a separate reed-stem. It was a sweet uncertainty of song, a thin, harpish resonance of repeated notes, reedy, far-carrying, wistful, always about to end yet never ending, as though the reeds themselves were singing. It is a song that will not fade into silence. It has to be listened to. The strange jerky twanging is like a forgotten language. No other bird has this lonely chant lying beneath the surface of his song. Dragonflies hovered, and settled on the green and yellow sifting of the barley. Their wings were invisible. Their narrow bodies, two inches long, were like many-jointed stems of porcelain. They clung to the barley, where they looked like hanging fragments of white twig. Small insects were lured towards this limpid whiteness, and were easily caught.
Over the flat fields of potatoes, ridged with deep green and the sleep white of blossom, the heat-haze was tall and shining. Men moved slowly on the far side of fields that seemed immense. They were bent and distorted by the haze. The weight of a great age seemed to hang upon them, as though they had moved back into the past, as though they had gone out through the shine of the now to bring back the dead to labour in the heat that was once their own. There was a throwing down of hoes, a settling of shapes into the lower haze. Then a man strode away, moving with crinkled knees, wading up towards the light. He dwindled along the dry farm road till his head was deep down and lost in the vapour of the skyline. Then the fields were empty. The haze moved gently from side to side in a slow ritual motion.
There was a faint coolness at the water’s edge, but up in the wood the heat was as solid as the dusty trees. Even where the wood had been cleared, where large bundles of faggots were lying, there was no air, no gap in the pale hot dusk. I foundered into shade, and slept for a time under the huskiness of dry-rattling branches. Beyond the wood, the sunlight stood firm and changeless in the rising wind.
I woke to the soft calling of a kestrel. It was perched in a solitary oak on the far side of the clearing, out in the shimmering mist of heat. It rose, and the blue sky slid beneath it. More sky poured under, and the sharp hawk glinted small. There was coolness for the eye in that smooth ascension. I walked across the fields between the woods. The zenith of the day was past, and the light was tilting down towards the distant shade of night. The white glare was fading to a yellowness that was like pale shadow. The air was still intensely hot, but it was broken into segments by the wind.
All the heat of the day had gathered in a valley to the north of the wood. The heavy walls of the trees were ivied with dusk; the winding light of paths faded up into the wood, and sombred away to shadow. The steep lane rose and fell beneath the evening sun, smooth and warm and shining like a sleeping snake, gliding under martins and swallows. Honeysuckle twined its cold fragrance from the passing hedge. Bracken and willow-herb shone between trees where lakes of sunlight slowly dried away. The heat floated up into the sky, and the cool evening air poured like water through the parching wood. A barn owl came flying from the east, gathering light from the glow of the fields, bearing away the aching and the glare.
The wood is remote, and secretive, under the flowing down of the day’s great heat, like an animal stretching towards sleep. Later, at the first cool touch of night, it exhales a sweet-smelling cow’s breath of hot bracken, birch leaves, and dusty bark, and that strange scent which is kindled by them and is indefinable. Then the lane is a rising and falling of heat and cold, and the horizontal fragrance of the honeysuckle whips across my face in cold white flashes, like the smell of a storm.
I went past the farm to the west of the wood, where the high barns glowed with hay, down the dusty path between the dry rustling of the corn, and out into the sand-coloured stubble of the big hayfield. The bales of hay were standing far apart, or leaning together in clusters, scattered irregularly across the field. Some bales were seven feet tall, some only three or four. They were already fading to dull yellow, the compressed grass withered and dry, and sere as reeds. But I could not believe the grass was dead. Hay has no beginning, and no end. It is a suspension between life and death. The bales were damp on the eastern side, where the sun had not yet dried them. I could not smell the hay till I pressed my face against its prickly warmth. The possessive reek of a fox hung in the heavy air. Already the green and white striped stubble was soaking with dew. Many blackbirds, thrushes, and starlings, were feeding in the aftermath. Skylarks sang up into the sky’s vast globe of pearl; swifts and swallows flickered at the rim, like fins. Rabbits leapt at the edges of the fields, in and out of the long shadows.
Close to the wood, a flock of lapwings was calling and running forward. There were thirty of them, moving like a darkness over the pale gleam of stubble and the paler gleam of the ungathered hay. They flew up into the yellow sunlight, changing from black and white to a revolving of green and blue, blue-black and orange. Thrushes and tree pipits sang beside the wood. The mower has left a fringe of buttercups, and some tall grass still stands, looking now a strange, deep, foreign green. The heavy-shaded oaks, whose branches reach out like dark wings above the edges of the field, seem lighter now the grass is down. The flat shine of the stubble is reflected on the undersides of the leaves. The light of the grass has fallen. It lies like a Pharoah in the sweet embalmment of the hay. In a mown field there is always something floating, just above the ground, invisible, impalpable. The air that moved between the grasses seems to be still hovering there. The whole field floats upward. Its weight is in the bales; the rest is buoyant, like a rising sea. Far above the sun, high clouds of cirrus shone like silver wisps of hay.
Leaving the field, I walked slowly up the path beside the larch wood. It was nine o’clock. A wren sang briefly, and left the silence tingling. Deep down in the oaks to the north, there was the submerged sound of distant woodpigeons singing. The bracken smelt fresh in the open, but under the oaks and larches it was rank and decaying. Suddenly there was a sharp, sweet scent, rather sickly and female. It seemed to come from the grass of the ride, but when I bent down to look closer, it had gone. There was no flower there. Seen from low down, the bracken to the south was high and hemlock-dark; the rosebay willow-herb shone like stands of purple pine. The sun was pencilled with clouds. It sank beneath them, red and gold, and rested on the skyline. The oaks and larches of the wood were crossed with a last touch of fire. Fox-flames burnt briefly upon bark, a splash of liquid colour. Hot golden light burnt deep, branding the trees with a ring of fire. Then it suddenly withdrew, retracted in long flashes across fields, and whipped downward with the sinking sun. What a god-denying betrayal it must have seemed to the first men, to find that the sun would not float upon cloud or water, but would always sink, would always plunge into the skyline, never to be dug up again, burrowing like a golden mole to burst at morning into eastern air.
One by one the thrushes stopped singing. The only bird-sound left was a distant piety of robins. I went back towards the hayfield. Colder air was already piercing the warmth of the ride. Everything was very still, quieter since the setting of the sun. The sun is silent, yet unconsciously we may be aware of its endlessly roaring flames, like the far whisper of an unseen waterfall. Three mallard flew down into the red gulf of the sunset. A late swift chafed the zenith of the cooling sky. Over and through and over the long hedge that slants around the field, a male sparrowhawk came weaving and fanning and gliding. He drifted up into an oak, and was held there by the dark boughs. Nothing came away. Through the moonlight of my binoculars, I saw him standing on a branch, dwarfish and malevolent, his ringed eye dulling to an ashen core. Dusk-coloured, he crouched and waited in the night of the tree. Every twig seemed to vein inwards to the fevered heart of the hawk. Then spasm, contortion; he grazed across the light, swerving like a bat. He was chasing a bat. He could not catch it. He wrenched away, and dropped with choking suddenness on to the song of a robin. Somewhere in the silver water of the birches there was a wild splashing of wings. Then all was quiet. The song came again, but not the hawk.
The sky was still bright above the hayfield. Near the hedge, up against the western horizon, a fox was sitting on a bale of hay. He peered downwards, walked along a line of bales, then stopped to wash himself. Rabbits fed nearby, but they were not alarmed. Occasionally the fox leapt into the air like a kitten, back legs leaving the ground, front legs waving, jaw snapping shut as he tried to catch moths. He was a thin-looking fox, with big pointed ears, very red and white. Suddenly he jumped away from the bales and trotted quickly down into a gulley. Rabbits scuttled into the hedge. The fox re-appeared, much closer now. He watched the rabbits, but did not follow them. He came towards me, head held low, the fluffy red fur of his chest ruffling as he ran. He was a large cub, still rather woolly, with bandy, wobbly-looking legs. Five yards away he saw my feet, and stopped. He stared at them. Very slowly he raised his head and looked higher, but his eyes did not focus on my face. They seemed not to rise above waist-level. In the half-light they looked dull brown, with dark treacly pupils. I could sense his sudden gasp, his long indrawn breath, his prolonged tremor of wonder, of bewilderment, of fear, of indecision. He bucked, throwing up his hind legs, as a rabbit does. He sank down, and looked up at me from a different angle. Then he turned, and ran away. His white-tipped tail was dark, darker than his body. It filled with air and looked thick and solid as he ran.
I went down towards the wood. A tawny owl called ‘kee-wick’, the first true sound of night. Slowly I walked down the long slope of the field and up into the hushed unanimity of oaks that rose on the far side. As I came nearer, they seemed to move apart. Their stillness was dark and immense, a weight upon the eyes, a pressing-in of the ear-drums. The afterglow in the west reddened the trees’ rough bark. I touched it to be sure that it was not some strange luminosity that would come off on to my fingers. My hand cast a faint shadow. The sun had set half an hour before. It was the stillness of the trees that made them so vividly alive. They seemed to be holding themselves upright in a tall silence, like hunters that do not wish to be seen. They were drawing together across the last remaining light, closing in, massing. The soft greyness of the wood was hardening to a unity of black; inimical, if you believe the dumb are your enemies.
The scent of the wood was stronger now, a rich warmth flowing outwards like a river of leaves. The field was damp and cold with the dew. The white-starred elders held wisps of heat above the dark skull of the rabbit warren. Delicate, thin-stepping, a fox trotted by, like a wind walking softly through the grass. A heron flew westward, black-winged and ponderous with the night to come. The white flakes of the ghost moths fumbled at the bracken. Stones gleamed white in the dry earth, and dead grass shone. A dozen noctule bats came out of the wood with a rush, like a dry crepitation of fluttering hands. The larched air was foiled and wrinkled with their leathery swarming. They swooped and curved over the whitening sky, capturing insects. A smoke of sounds drifted from the distant village: the fraying bark of a dog, a dusk of voices.
The tawny owl’s dark release of song quavered from the pine wood. The sleek dusk bristled with it, like the fur of a cat. I moved under the gloomy trees. The owl surfed out across the rising night. He could hear the turn of a dry leaf, the relaxing of a twig, the loud scamper of a soft-skinned mouse. To him the silence was a flare of sound, a brilliant day of noises dazzling through the veins of dusk. Lynchets of light were striped over the dark ground, and he could interpret them, like forgotten field-shapes found from high above. The wood rose beneath him, dominioned like a wolf’s mane, black and silver-grey. Then the map of darkness streamed with a flight of glittering eyes; and the thin sound of a mouse-death whined high in the heavy air.
Under the oppressive warmth of the oaks, I waited for the nightjar to appear, but by ten o’clock it still had not called or sung. Two hawks flitted low above the bracken, like the shadows of small hands clenching and unclenching. They spurted along, dancing on the tips of their wings, like rays finning along the bottom of the sea. One was chasing the other, but could see no more than that. They were sudden leaps of darkness, and then nothing. A badger blundered through the bracken, making more noise than a man. It was going down to drink at the stream. A pipistrelle bat twitched and tugged at the light. The nightjar did not sing till ten minutes past ten, fifty minutes after sunset. He perched on a dead tree, but I could hardly see him. The still air throbbed almost painfully with the dryness of his song. Then came the sudden ending, the whirring bubble-notes, and the weird wing-smacking. Most exciting of all was the silence, when I did not know where he was, when the whole dusk seemed to be leaping and gliding with long, light wings, seemed to be hoarse and gaping with wide, moth-catching, sack-like mouths.
Five minutes later there were two nightjars in the clearing, just visible when they crossed the zenith of the sky. All light came from above. It had withdrawn completely from the ground, even from the whitest of the big flinty stones. The nightjars chased between the trees, looping and turning in narrow circles, slashing the smooth velvet dusk, threading darkness through the light. They flew low above the bracken. I heard a deep purring sound rising from them as they sank down. It was very different from the song. This was a deep-throated, softer sound, a vibrant humming, like the ecstatic purring of a tiger. It seemed to grip and shake the darkness, dizzying low, spreading over the ground like murmuring water. Its warm vibration sucked at my ears. The birds came close to me. I saw the white spots on the wings of the male, and the white tips of his outer tail feathers, like chips of white wood whirring across the bracken. Then they had gone, sinking and slurring down into the dark valley, leaving the air colder, void, and the night suddenly descending.
I went back to the hayfield. Lapwings scattered, and called loudly. Their calling is always louder at night, a sharp emphatic ‘pee-wit’, with a pause between the syllables. The smell of the hay was stronger, sweeter now; the whole field was adrift with it. It was the smell of raw green death, exuberant, nostalgic, piercing; the sour sweetness of decay, the earth itself in flower. Breathing it, I seemed to become lighter, aerial. I ran through the dark field, ran between the tall trilithons of the hay bales that leant against the sky like the tilted circle of Stonehenge. It seemed that deep in the ground, far below in the past, men were lifting the hay towards me. And I could bend to meet them, passing my arms down through the stiffness of the earth to receive the death of grass, the midsummer changing of the grass into the dry papyrus of the living hay.
The moon rose from the dark rim of the wood, a red arc flaming upward like a fire rising, turning from red to orange, from orange to a circle of deep yellow. The hay bales flung their long shadows from them, like a silent flinging out of wings. The hay was white as frost. The trees were darker now the moon had risen. I walked through the pine wood. The grass in the rides had been cut and left to dry. It swished softly over my feet. The pines and spruces were black beside me, but up in the moonlight, high above, they were blue, deep blue, like the draped wings of the magpie that hung glittering down from the dead gallows-tree. A tawny owl rushed from branch to branch, as fast and light as a hawk. A hawk would have seemed almost cumbersome compared with this cloud-soft throwing forward of the silence.
Over the hayfield, the nightjar leapt and glided, swayed and fluttered, black and silver-white in the phosphorescence that seemed to scatter like spray from his moonlit wings. He perched on the tall bales, breathing out the dark snake of his song to fork and flicker at the moon. He was curious, and quite without fear. He followed me as I walked across the field, circling above my head, beating his wings and leaping upward: a soft, slow beat, a brief pause, then the incredibly light and buoyant lifting, springing up through the damp air like dark flame rising from the mouth of his wings. With wide-open bill he netted the big ghost moths that twisted away like white lips over the bracken feathering my hands.
Clouds hid the moon. The night sank into shadow, and soft owl-voices raised the trees. After eleven o’clock the nightjar did not sing so often. His song was briefer, less loud, less fervent, more even in pitch and tone. Between midnight and two o’clock I heard him twice. He did not come back to the dead tree. He sang occasionally after three o’clock, but he was silent long before sunrise. I did not know where his nest was, and in the complete darkness I was afraid to walk far in case I should tread upon it.
Reed warblers sang at midnight along the moonlit stream, a sound that hovered like a shining mist. But when the moon had gone, I could see nothing. Only my hands could tell the black air from the black bark. The clouds seemed to be very low, hanging like cobwebs between the tops of trees, dragging clammily across my face. The dense midsummer smell of the birch leaves had dispersed in the cold air. A badger screamed, a long, gurgling tusk of sound curving up into the darkness and twisting loose into a gash of foamy white. Bats creaked among the trees. The returning silence, the silence encircling me, moving inwards, inwards, like silent wings, was the sound of night. The mind seemed to open like a flower to let the silence enter, wings folding within, thousands of dark wings folding down into the darkness of the mind. I clung to the bracken, hung helplessly in sleep from the dark mane of the spinning world.
By two o’clock there was a paler darkness in the eastern sky. It grew and spread till it was brighter than the returning moon, brighter than the afterglow of sunset, a great arch of light burning away the starry edge, curving over the darkness above me, dwindling it down, flaring behind the horizon till all was clear and new again. The earth had risen.
A carrion crow called, defiling the light with the black imprint of his wings. The sky was blue and wet and shivering. The first lark sang. The sun rose, and black shadows fled across the blazing rainbow dew-shine of the starry grass. The hayfield lay prone beneath the sunlight, no longer aerial. Apocalyptic bird-song rang from wood to wood.
I went down to the lane, dazed by the brilliance of the day, my mind still webbed with night’s fading blackness, with the darkness that even in the brightest sunlight never completely dies. We have our darkness within us, our beating hearts are black, our limbs move in black nets of muscle; light enters our bodies only through the sudden wound.