The night never ceases when we wish. I open my eyes to await the sun, the daily awakening routine, Arghezi bringing round the first meal of the day.

Instead, there is the dark sea, the gray wake fading into the distance, the brief and definitive grinding of the helm as it struggles to keep us on course. The wind again.

Olgaren keeps the route, silent.

The full sails are, in their whiteness, like another pale moon in the distance. I look sternward, at the masts of the Demeter bearing their heavy rigging. A strange foliage, trees hiding between the bolts of cloth and hemp that surround us.

We ride through nocturnal forests toward another darkness, immersed in the aroma of the hidden earth in the hold. Earth from Wallachia, where tombs are still opened to certify that their dead remain motionless, hands free of bites, of that careful, secret gnawing.

The Wieszcy.

Dead devouring themselves, black teeth finishing off dark flesh. And relatives dying at the same time, while the secret feast is consumed. Flesh of their flesh, food in death.

There are men with the habit of sleeping on the graves, waiting for the world to fall silent, for the night to breathe easy, in order to listen to those who inhabit the coffins, to hear flesh tearing deep in the earth, men who swallow their horror when they hear something, pressing against the abyss that yawns under their bodies, supported and formed by the black earth in which they hide their faces, fearing what can be found there ….

Earth we haul across the sea.

I look at my shadow on the ship’s wood, nocturnal shade cast by pallid moon.

I notice then that there are too many shadows on the bridge, crossing one another, gray ones going black where several overlap, traces of multiple wicks that have been lit.

Lamps next to the Helmsman, suspended over the bell, next to the board, illuminating the stairs leading to the bridge, Olgaren’s white face that focuses more on that watch fire dispersed widely within glass walls than on the compass.

They serve as our protection against the night, the only manner of ensuring that nothing will leap from the black without our seeing what it is.

Yet ... what if the last gift of light is the sight of something that belongs to naught but the night? What if death is more merciful than the appearance of whatever should come for our flesh?

Still, there is no more protection than fire. The insubstantial, flickering walls form the room in which we hide, the only space we count as ours in the unending mansion of the nocturnal sea.

I stand by the Helmsman, knowing that I am no true company, nothing capable of eroding the fear of the man who moves his lips without ceasing.

Well I know the prayer you mutter, a litany composed of descending numbers: the seconds that remain before dawn.

I know the wherefore of my fear. But not that of the Helmsman. There is naught here that should frighten him, only night, and darkness, and the wind that does not cease, and the fluttering sails, and a white-faced captain emerging from the shadows to say nothing, while he observes the transparent sky of the horizon, seeking that nascent light that is his only surety.

Above us, the sky is losing consistency, as if the night were a huge fish plunging into a midday sea, its dark color fading into the transparent blue.

It dawns, while the darkness leaves in search of other depths.

Together with the stars, the wind disappears. A mist rises from the sea and the sails droop. They are no longer taut skins but tired, weak limbs.

The air no longer moans around us; the aroma of earth is now redolent of salt.

The speed of the Demeter decreases, until it all-but stops. There is naught but sea around us, no other men than us.

One can perceive the nothingness that isolates us.

Something has finished. In this calm, it is possible to savor that notion, to feel it in every inch of one’s skin.

I behold the sunrise and understand.

Light cannot protect us from everything.