We set out after meals to have a stroll near the fields. It was a hot summer evening and it was difficult to go to sleep. The win was very faint, and, it being a full-moon night and as bright almost as day, we were irresistibly drawn to walk a little before lying down for sleep. Near our bouse, there are fields, through which a road runs leading to gardens beyond. We therefore slowly walked towards them.
The moonlight had converted everything around to a network of light and shade. Here and there on our path we had trees, which were thickly covered with leaves in their summer’s luxuriance. As we passed under one of thein, we felt our hands, feet, and clothes were daubed thick with patches of light and darkness. What accurate reflections and shadows light throws through the openings in leaves and other things, I had now perceived for the first time.
As we had gone a little distance, we looked back towards the small town. The white and black walls and the tops of the tall houses of the rich and the spires of the mosques gave it a look of a sleeping city. a city of mysterious, unearthly beings. Nothing was stirring, but everything presented an impression of impenetrable silence. A few lights were twinkling from windows and house-tops, and a few dim figures could be seen to move but of a sudden it appeared, the moonlight had converted that dull and grey town let into a supremely suggestive city.[the_ad id=”17141″]
This is what moonlight does. It aids the imagination to see beauty by presenting objects through a medium which softens their commonplace darbness and presents them through a suggestive mist. or haze, as it were.
We looked ahead of us. The fields, mostly lying fallow, presented a dim and shadowy expanse. The trees were standing at intervals like ghostly sentinels. The white road ran lie a line of chalk over the sandy earth, and at a distance could be seen a well with the long bar of a Persian wheel stretching right over it. Near it was some kind of a cottage, where the farmer rested in the day. We made for it. It was distant about a quarter of a mile. Over the well was a Neem tree.
We sat on the bar of the well-a comfortable perch for a few minutes. The whole place around was desolate. We did not feel like talking and disturbing that deep loneliness with the intrusion of a human voice. A calf was sitting near us, evidently thirsty. I and my friend pushed the wheel-bar and pulled out a little water for the calf, which eagerly drank of it. Then we sat again. The breeze was now rising and with its movement here and there the sand in the fields began to be disturbed. The shadows of the Neem tree also began to shake. We felt we could now get sleep without much pain. So we set off for home, and within a quarter of an hour lay down on our cots on the roof of our host’s house.
