...of dejection

Homayoun was sitting in front of the gas heater together with his young wife and their little daughter, Homa. They were in the family room but unlike the past, when laughter and happiness and laughter ruled in this room on Fridays, today they were all sad and silent. Even their little daughter who usually livened things up looked dull and gloomy today. She had a plaster-made doll next to her - the doll had a broken face - and was staring outside. It was as if she too was sensing that something was wrong, and the thing that was wrong was the fact that Uncle Bahram had failed to come to see them as was his habit. She was also feeling that her parents' sadness was on his account: the black clothes, the eyes red-rimmed from the lack of sleep, and the cigarette smoke which waved in the air all reinforced this suspicion.

[Whirlpool, Hedayat, S.]

...of the deaf and dumb

For a long time Mr Tefft had hesitated over which of the many deserving causes he knew of should benefit in the event of Katherine's negligence. Mr Brindle had, in turn, suggested to his client a home for retired clerks, a school for orphans of men lost at sea, and a small mill staffed by young ladies rescued from Satan. Mr Tefft had expressed courteous interest and given small donations, but it was only after a typhoon had driven his impotent ship through the Djailoto Passage and into the roaring blackness of the Pacific, that he discovered precisely which charity would benefit from his burial at sea.

It was a home for the deaf and dumb a few miles from Gloucester. In its white-washed rooms, with their chintz and flowerpots, Mr Tefft found an oasis remote from his nightmare. The deaf could not hear the oceans rushing to the deeps not the dumb utter their horror at the thought. So Mr Tefft often visited the home, sat with its softly blinking inmates and poured out his visions to them. They would listen, nodding and smiling at the mere presence of this tall gentleman who came with baskets of fruit and addressed their silence with such seriousness. After having spoken his piece, Mr Tefft would feel less afraid. Yes, either his fortune would be Katherine's or - if by some dread negligence he fell a prey to the deeps - it would profit these men and women over whose brains the sea had no spell.

[The Deeps of the Sea, Steiner, G.]

...of Mindanao Deep

The deeps of the sea were driving Mr Aaron Tefft to the brink of insanity. On the marine charts papering the walls of his study in Salem, the deeps were marked in tints of mounting stridence, from the quiet blue star encircling Sigsbee Deep, a mere 12,425 feet beneath the Gulf of Mexico to the blood-red figure out of the cabbala which circumscribed the world's abyss, the centre of Mr Tefft's nightmares, Mindanao Deep, 35,400 feet below the glint of the sun. Not that Mr Tefft looked often at the map on which this final pit was so manifestly charted. His brain reeled at the thought of that funnel of night in which Everest would pass unnoticed, its snow plume choked six thousand feet under the silence of the sea.

[The Deeps of the Sea, Steiner, G.]

...of the Chauvet cave

Silence. I turn off the helmet lamp. A darkness. In the darkness the silence becomes encyclopedic, condensing everything that has occurred in the interval between then and now.

On a rock in front of me, a cluster of red squarish dots. The freshness of the red is startling. As present and immediate as a smell, or as the colour of flowers on a June evening when the sun is going down. These dots were made by applying red oxide pigment to the palm of a hand and then pressing it against the rock. One particular hand has been identified on account of a disjointed little finger, and another imprint of the same hand was found elsewhere in the cave.

On another rock, similar dots, making an overall shape which is like the side view of a bison. The marks of the hands fill the animal's body.

Darkness.

Before the women, men and children arrived (there is a footprint of a child of about eleven in the cave) and after they left for good, the place was inhabited by bears. Probably also by wolves and other animals, but the bears were the masters with whom the nomads had to share the cave. On wall after wall, the scratches of bear paws. Footprints show where a bear walked with her cub, feeling her way in the dark. In the largest and most central of the cave's chambers, which is fifteen metres high, there are numerous wallows or depressions in the clay on the ground where bears lay asleep during their winter hibernation. One hundred and fifty bear skulls have been found here. One of them had been solemnly placed - probably by a Cro-Magnon - on a kind of rock plinth in the furthest reach of the cave.

Silence.

In the silence, the extent and size of the place begins to count for more and more. The cave is half a kilometre long and sometimes fifty metres wide. Geometrical measurements, however, do not apply because one is inside something like a body.

[Here Is Where We Meet, Berger, J.]

..of taciturnity

Nobody wore hats in those days, and she did! She wore a hat as if she were going to the races! Askew on the back of her head!

He said nothing. I let him think. And the silence continued. Hubert had always been prone to silences - as if life hung by a thread and foolish talking might snap it. In the silence I could feel that, since Gwen's death, the standards the two of them established and maintained here had in no way changed. What this room liked was still the same.

[Here Is Where We Meet, Berger, J.]

...of preference

He puts his long hand around the can of beer on the table and clinks it against mine.

Whenever possible, he preferred gestures to spoken words. Perhaps as a result of his respect for silent written words. He must have studied in libraries, yet for him the immediate place for a book was a raincoat pocket. And the books he pulled out of that pocket!

[Here Is Where We Meet, Berger, J.]

...of one thing repaired

Let's hope only for what has some chance of being achieved! Let a few things be repaired. A few is a lot. One thing repaired changes a thousand others.

So?

The dog down there is on too short a chain. Change it, lengthen it. Then he'll be able to reach the shade, and he'll lie down and he'll stop barking. And the silence will remind the mother she wanted a canary in a cage in the kitchen. And when the canary sings, she'll do more ironing. And the father's shoulders in a freshly ironed shirt will ache less when he goes to work. And so when he comes home he'll sometimes joke, like he used to, with his teenage daughter. And the daughter will change her mind and decide, just this once, to bring her lover home one evening. And on another evening, the father will propose to the young man that they go fishing together... Who in the world knows? Just lengthen the chain.

[Here Is Where We Meet, Berger, J.]

...of motive

So time doesn't count, and place does? I said this to tease her. When I was a man, I liked teasing her and she went along with it, consenting, for it reminded us both of a sadness that had passed.

When I was a child her sureness enraged me (regardless of the argument involved). It was a sureness that revealed - at least to my eyes - how, behind the bravado, she was vulnerable and hesitant, whereas I wanted her to be invincible. Consequently, I would contradict whatever it was she was being so certain about, in the hope that we might discover something else, which we could question together with a shared confidence. Yet what happened, in fact, was that my counter-attacks made her more frail than she usually was, and the two of us would be drawn, helpless, into a maelstrom of perdition and lamentation, silently crying out for an angel to come and save us. On no occasion did an angel come.

[Here Is Where We Meet, Berger, J.]

...of estrangement

'We've had some pie and now we're having some cabbage-and-meat soup, with bread,' Petya announced. 'And you, father, must go first thing tomorrow to the District Soviet and the Military Commissariat. Then you'll be put on the list straight away and we'll get ration cards for you more quickly.'

'All right,' said the father obediently.

'Yes, and mind you don't oversleep and forget.'

'I won't,' the father promised.

Their first shared meal after the war - soup with meat - was eaten by the family in silence, with even Petya sitting there calmly; it was as if the father and mother were afraid of destroying, through some chance word, the quiet happiness of a family sitting together.

[The Return, Platonov, A. P.]

...of bemoaning

The sons silently wept occasional slow tears, twisting their faces in order to bear grief without a sound. The father was no longer crying; he had cried himself out alone, before the others, and now, with secret excitement and an out-of-place joy, he was looking at his sturdy band of sons. Two of them were sailors - captains of ships; one was an actor from Moscow; the one with the daughter was a physicist and a Party member; the youngest was studying to be an agronomist; and the eldest was a head engineer in an aeroplane factory and wore on his chest a medal for honourable labour. All six of them - seven including the father - were silent around the dead mother and mourned her without a word, hiding from one another their despair, their memories of childhood and of love's departed happiness, which had sprung up continually, making no demands, in their mother's heart and which had always found them - even across thousands of miles - and they had sensed it constantly and instinctively and this had made them stronger and they had been successful in life more boldly. Now their mother had turned into a corpse; she could no longer love anyone and was lying their like an indifferent stranger, an old woman who had nothing to do with them.

[The Third Son, Platonov, A. P.]

...of tragicomedy

On top of the rock, the lion raised his head and saw, right next to him, policewoman Katya, leaning over the front rail of one of the second-row boxes. She was looking straight at him. The leonine heart thumped once, twice, and then stopped. He was trembling all over. His fate was about to be decided. Already the spear was flying towards him... Ouch! - it struck him in the side. Now he had to fall. But suppose he again fell the wrong way and ruined everything? He had never felt so terrified in all his life - it was far worse than when he used to climb out of the trenches...

The audience had already noticed that something wasn't right: the mortally wounded lion was standing stock-still on top of the rock and gazing down. The front rows heard the producer's terrible whisper:

'Fall, damn you, fall!'

Then they all saw a most bizarre thing: the lion raised its right paw, quickly crossed itself, and plumped down off the rock like a stone...

There was a moment of numbed silence, then a roar of laughter exploded in the auditorium like a grenade. Policewoman Katya was laughing so hard that she was in tears. The slain lion buried its muzzle in its paws and sobbed.

[The Lion, Zamyatin, Y. I.]

...of the unexpected

And suddenly Strokotov leaped to his feet, terrible and black, his hair standing on end.

'To hell with you!' he howled. 'To hell with a-a-all! of you-ou-ou! I just can't...'

And, swinging the pot-bellied bottle above his head, as if he were an Indian with a tomahawk, he hurled it out through the open window.

'Hold me back!' wheezed Kyate. 'Hold me back! I'm probably going to kill him.'

'Be quiet!' the old woman shouted hysterically, and suddenly, to universal astonishment, lifted up her leg and began to pull off her shoe. She then slipped a hand down her stocking and removed a piece of folded newspaper from beneath her heel. Everyone froze, silently watching in fear and wonder, the way people watch a conjuror as he produces a live chicken from an empty hat.

The old woman unfolded the newspaper and took out a compressed hundred-franc note.

'There! Maybe this will shut you up,' she said calmly, holding the money out to her daughter.

[A Family Journey, Teffi.]

...of the grave

'A sword, sir, means honour!' - and that shout was the last I heard from the General. This was followed by hubbub and uproar, by long and furious howls, and I could make out nothing but Avdotya Ignatyevna's hysterically impatient squeals: 'Come on, come on now! Oh, when are we going to start feeling ashamed of nothing?'

'Oh-oh-oh! Verily my soul is passing through torments!' came the voice of the simple tradesman, and -

And here I sneezed. This happened suddenly and unintentionally, but its effect was remarkable: everything dissolved like a dream, there was just deathly silence. Yes, the silence was truly sepulchral. I don't think it was a matter of them feeling shame in my presence: they had resolved, after all, to feel ashamed of nothing! I waited another five minutes or so - not a word, not a sound. Nor is it to be supposed that they were afraid of being reported to the police, for what could the police have done? I am forced to conclude that those under the ground must, after all, have some secret unknown to mortals and which they are careful to conceal from mortals.

[Bobok, Dostoyevsky, F. H.]

...of dread

Suddenly there was a shrill whooping, the troika ahead of us rushed forward, almost leaving the ground, and when it got to the bridge it stopped dead in its tracks, a bit to one side of the road. My heart sank into my boots.

'Well, Filofey, my friend,' I said, 'you and I are going to meet our Maker. Forgive me for cutting short your life.'

'It's not your fault, Mister! What will be, will be! Well, Shaggy, me dearie,' said Filofey, turning to the shaft-horse, 'forward march, brother! 'Elp us out for the last time! Nothing for it...Oh Lord, have mercy on us!'

And he ordered the horses to trot.

Now, as we approached the bridge and the motionless, threatening cart, everything, as though by design, went completely quiet. Not a single sound! Just like a pike or a hawk or any predator when its prey is close. Now we were almost level with the cart, and the giant in the sheepskin jacket suddenly jumped down and was coming straight toward us.

[The Knocking, Turgenev, I. S.]

...of a river

What was going on? I was lying in the wagon as before, but all around the wagon - and not more than half an arm's length below its floor - there was a smooth, moonlit, watery expanse, trembling and breaking up into small, distinct ripples. I looked in front: on the driver's seat, hanging his head and slouching forward, Filofey was sitting as motionless as a stuffed dummy, and a little further away, above the murmuring water, lay the curved shaft-bow and the backs and heads of the horses. And everything was as still, as silent, as if we were in a magic realm, as if it were all a dream, a fabulous dream. What on earth was going on? I looked behind, from under the hood at the rear of the wagon. Why, we were in the very middle of the river, a good thirty paces from either bank!

[The Knocking, Turgenev, I. S.]

...of a general

...His usual conversation with his subordinates was strict as strict could be and consisted almost entirely of three phrases: 'How dare you? Do you realise whom you are talking? Are you aware who is standing before you?' He was, however, a good man at heart, loyal to his friends and ready to oblige, but the rank of general had completely turned his head. His promotion had somehow bewildered him and thrown him off balance, and he really had no idea how he should behave. When he was with his equals, he was a quite decent man, very gentlemanly in fact, and in many respects even intelligent; but as soon as he chanced to be in the company of men even only one rank beneath him, he was simply a lost soul: he could not say a word, and people felt pity for him, all the more so since he sensed that he could have been spending his time incomparably better. Sometimes his eyes betrayed a strong wish to join some interesting group or conversation, but he was always stopped by the thought that this might be going too far, that such over-friendliness on his part might detract from his significance. And so, as a result of these considerations he remained forever in the same condition of silence, pronouncing only the occasional monosyllable and acquiring the reputation of being exceptionally boring...

[The Greatcoat, Gogol, N. V.]

...of a gamble

The following evening, Hermann appeared again at the card table. Everyone was expecting him. The generals and privy councillors abandoned their whist to watch such extraordinary play. The young officers leaped up from their sofas; the servants all congregated in the drawing room. Everyone clustered around Hermann. The other gamblers let their turns pass, impatient to see how Hermann would end. Hermann stood by the table, about to play alone against a pale but still smiling Chekalinsky. Each unsealed a new pack. Chekalinsky shuffled. Hermann chose his card and placed it on the table, covering it with a heap of bank notes. It was like a duel. Deep silence reigned all around. Chekalinsky dealt; his hands were trembling. To the right - a queen; to the left - an ace.

[The Queen of Spades, Pushkin, A. S.]

...of avarice

Lizaveta Ivanovna listened to him in horror. So the passionate letters, the ardent demands, the audacious, persistent pursuit - all this had not been love! What his soul craved was money! She herself had no power to assuage his desires and make him happy. The poor ward had been nothing but a blind accomplice to a brigand, to the murderer of her aged benefactress! She wept bitterly in her belated, anguished remorse. Hermann watched her in silence; he too was in torment, but what troubled his stern soul was neither the poor girl's tears nor the surprising charm of her grief. Nor did he feel any pang of conscience at the thought of the old woman's death. Only one thing appalled him; the irrevocable loss of a secret that was to have brought him wealth.

[The Queen of Spades, Pushkin, A. S.]

...of welcome

The whir and rattle of the bus was a rhythmic percussion syncopating the anger in my heart into a steady, throbbing hate, until I felt rather light-headed. I disembarked outside the London Hospital and walked towards Commercial Road and Priddle Street where the Seales lived. As I turned into the narrow roadway I could see the drearily ornate hearse parked there, and the small group of curiosity-seekers who somehow always materialise to gape open-mouthed on the misery of others. And then I stopped, feeling suddenly washed clean, whole and alive again. Tears were in my eyes, unashamedly, for there, standing in a close, separate group on the pavement outside Seales' door was my class, my children, all or nearly all of them, smart and self-conscious in their best clothes. O God, forgive me for the hateful thoughts, because I love them, these brutal, disarming bastards, I love them...

I hurried over to join them to be again with them, a part of them. They welcomed me silently, pride and something else shining in their eyes as they gathered close around me. I felt something soft pressed into my hand, and as I looked round into the clear, shining eyes of Pamela Dare, I dried my own eyes with the tiny handkerchief.

[To Sir, With Love, Braithwaite, E. R.]

...of a class of children

Looking back, I realise that in fact I passed through three phases in my relationship with them. The first was the silent treatment, and during that time, for my first few weeks, they would do any task I set them without question or protest, but equally without interest or enthusiasm; and if their interest was not required on the task in front of them they would sit and stare at me with the same careful, patient attention a birdwatcher devotes to the rare feathered visitor. I would sit at my desk busily correcting some of their written work and feel their eyes on me, then look up to see them sitting there, watchful, waiting. It made me nervous and irritable, but I kept a grip on myself.

[To Sir, With Love, Braithwaite, E. R.]

...of watchfulness

The afternoon's lessons passed without incident, but unsatisfactorily. The children neither chatted nor laughed, nor in any way challenged my authority, but at the same time they were uncooperative. They listened to me, or did the tasks assigned to them, like automata. My attempts at pleasantries were received with a chilly lack of response which indicated that my earlier remarks had got under their skin. Their silent watchfulness was getting under mine.

[To Sir, With Love, Braithwaite, E. R.]

...of listening

After the prayer the Head read a poem, La Belle Dame Sans Merci. The records which followed were Chopin's Fantaisie Impromptu, and part of Vivaldi's Concerto in C for two trumpets. They listened, those rough-looking, untidy children; every one of them sat still, unmoving and attentive, until the very echo of the last clear note had died away. Their silence was not the result of boredom or apathy, nor were they quiet because it was expected of them or through fear of consequences; but they were listening, actively, attentively listening to those records, with the same raptness they had shown in their jiving; their bodies were still, but I could feel that their minds and spirits were involved with the music. I glanced towards Miss Blanchard and as though she divined my thoughts she smiled at me and nodded in understanding.

[To Sir, With Love, Braithwaite, E. R.]

...of a cell

She had no idea what time it was when she heard the footsteps in the corridor outside her cell. It could have been five in the evening - it could have been midnight. She had been awake, staring blankly into the pitch darkness, longing for a sound. She had never imagined that silence could be so terrible. Once she had cried out, and there had been no echo, nothing. Just the memory of her own voice. She had visualised the sound breaking against the solid darkness like a fist against a rock. She had moved her hands about her as she sat on the bed, and it seemed to her that the darkness made them heavy, as if she were groping in the water. She knew the cell was small; that it contained the bed on which she sat, a hand-basin without taps and a crude table: she had seen them when she first entered. Then the light had gone out, and she had run wildly to where she knew the bed had stood, and struck it with her shins, and had remained there, shivering with fright. Until she heard the footsteps, and the door of her cell was opened abruptly.

[The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, le Carre, J.]

...of an interrogator

Mundt said nothing. Leamus became used to his silences as the interview progressed. Mundt had rather a pleasant voice, that was something Leamus hadn't expected, but he seldom spoke. It was part of Mundt's extraordinary self-confidence perhaps, that he did not speak unless he specifically wished to, that he was prepared to allow long silences to intervene rather than exchange pointless words. In this he differed from professional interrogators who set store by initiative, by the evocation of atmosphere and the exploitation of that psychological dependency of a prisoner upon his inquisitor. Mundt despised technique: he was a man of fact and action. Leamus preferred that.

[The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, le Carre, J.]

...of alertness

The lights in the annexe were controlled from some central point. They were put on and off by an unseen hand. In the mornings he was often woken by the sudden blaze of the single overhead light in his room. At night he would be hastened to bed by perfunctory darkness. It was only nine o'clock as he entered the annexe, and the lights were already out. Usually they stayed on till eleven, but now they were out and the shutters had been lowered. He had left the connecting door from the house open, so that the pale twilight from the hallway reached, but scarcely penetrated, the guards' bedroom, and by it he could just see the two empty beds. As he stood there peering into the room, surprised to find it empty, the door behind him closed. Perhaps by itself, but Leamus made no attempt to open it. It was pitch dark. No sound accompanied the closing of the door, no click nor footstep. To Leamus, his instinct suddenly alert, it was as if the sound-track had stopped. Then he smelt the cigar smoke. It must have been hanging in the air but he had not noticed it till now. Like a blind man, his senses of touch and smell were sharpened by the darkness.

[The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, le Carre, J.]

...of tolerance

He was contemptuous of his cell mates, and they hated him. They hated him because he succeeded in being what each in his heart longed to be: a mystery. He preserved from collectivisation some discernible part of his personality; he could not be drawn at moments of sentiment to talk of his girl, his family or his children. They knew nothing of Leamus; they waited, but he did not come to them. New prisoners are largely two kinds - there are those who for shame, fear or shock wait in fascinated horror to be initiated into the lore of prison life, and there are those who trade on their wretched novelty in order to endear themselves to the community. Leamus did neither of these things. He seemed pleased to despise them all, and they hated him because, like the world outside, he did not need them. After about ten days they had had enough. The great had had no homage, the small had had no comfort, so they crowded him in the dinner queue. Crowding is a prison ritual akin to the eighteenth-century practice of jostling. It has the virtue of an apparent accident, in which the prisoner's mess tin is upturned, and its contents spilt on his uniform. Leamus was barged from one side, while from the other an obliging hand descended on his forearm, and the thing was done. Leamus said nothing, looked thoughtfully at the two men on either side of him, and accepted in silence the filthy rebuke of a warder who knew quite well what had happened.

[The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, le Carre, J.]

...of a checkpoint

There was only one light in the checkpoint, a reading lamp with a green shade, but the glow of the arclights, like artificial moonlight, filled the cabin. Darkness had fallen, and with it silence. They spoke as if they were afraid of being overheard. Leamus went to the window and waited. In front of him the road and to either side the Wall, a dirty, ugly thing of breeze blocks and strands of barbed wire, lit with cheap yellow light, like the backdrop for a concentration camp. East and west of the Wall lay the unrestored part of Berlin, a half-world of ruin, drawn in two dimensions, crags of war.

[The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, le Carre, J. ]

...of laughter

'Watch out! The night, eh...'

He didn't hear his companion's advice. His hands in his pockets, his head thrown back, he thought of the clouds and the mountains, the rivers and the seas, and he broke into a silent laugh. A faint laugh which ran through him, like a breeze through a tree, and which thrilled him to the core. A faint laugh, but so much stronger than those clouds and mountains, those seas and rivers.

[Night Flight, Saint-Exupery, A. d.]

...of preoccupation

He now knocked gently on the door. There was no answer. Not daring to knock more loudly in the prevailing silence, he pushed open the door. Riviere was there. For the first time Robineau entered into Riviere's office almost on an equal footing, a bit like a friend. He felt a bit like a sergeant who joins the wounded general under fire, stands by him in defeat, and behaves like a brother to him in exile. 'Whatever happens, I am with you,' Robineau seemed to say.

Riviere spoke not a word; his head bowed, he was looking at his hands. Robineau standing before him, dared not speak. Even stricken, the old lion daunted him. Expressions of loyalty, of ever more rapt devotion kept mounting to his lips, but each time he raised his eyes he encountered the grey hair, the head three-quarters bowed, the lips tight-sealed over their bitter potion. Finally he screwed up his courage:

'Monsieur le Directeur...'

[Night Flight, Saint-Exupery, A. d.]

...of radio communication

The seconds ooze by. They really ooze like blood. Are they still in the air, or is their flight ended? Each second slays a hope. The flow of time now seems destructive. Twenty centuries of wear and tear, beating against the temple, nibbling and fissuring the granite and finally reducing it to dust, are now concentrated into each second threatening the crew.

Each second carries something away - Fabien's voice, Fabien's laugh, his smile. The silence gains ground. A heavier and heavier silence, bearing down on the crew like the weight of the sea.

[Night Flight, Saint-Exupery, A. d.]

...of telegrams

Riviere leafed through the telegrams from the southern airfields. All alike reported: no message from the plane. Some stations no longer answered Buenos Aires. The patch of silence was spreading over the map, as the little towns were swallowed up by the cyclone, their bolted doors and lightless streets as cut off from the world and lost in the night as a ship. Dawn alone would deliver them.

[Night Flight, Saint-Exupery, A. d.]

...of out-of-hours

The silence of the offices pleased him. He walked slowly through them, one after another, his footsteps echoing hollowly. The typewriters slept beneath their covers. The big cupboard doors had closed on their shelves of well ordered files. Ten years of work and experience. He felt as though he were visiting the vaults of a bank - there where there lies a weight of gold. But each of these registers had accumulated a finer stuff than gold - a stock of living energy. Living but asleep, like hoarded gold.

[Night Flight, Saint-Exupery, A. d.]

...of isolation

Then, as again tonight, he had felt lonely, but he had quickly realised the wealth of such a solitude. The message of this music had reached him, alone among these humdrum folk, with the softness of a secret. So now this star. Above all these shoulders he was being spoken to in a tongue which he alone could hear.

Someone jostled him on the pavement. 'I won't get angry,' he thought. 'I'm like the father of a sick child, walking with short steps in the crowd. Within him he carries the hushed silence of his house.'

He looked at the people around him, seeking to recognise those among them who with little steps were out walking their invention or their love; and he thought of the loneliness of lighthouse keepers.

[Night Flight, Saint-Exupery, A. d.]

...of the Andes

He made an effort to recall the precise sequence of events. He had been flying over the cordillera of the Andes. Beneath their coverlets of snow the mountains slept. The winter snows had spread their peace over this mountain mass, like the passage of the centuries in dead castles. One hundred and twenty miles across, one hundred and twenty miles of thickness - without a man, a breath of life, a movement. Nothing but vertical ridges which one grazed at twenty thousand feet, nothing but gigantic coats of stone dropping sheer, nothing but an awe-inspiring silence.

[Night Flight, Saint-Exupery, A. d.]