The darkness commences from the ravine and then continues to rise ever-upward like a turbid blue-purple mist, gradually obliterating faces, blurring lines, dulling colours, and rendering immaterial the distant trees along the horizon. At this point the mountain across the way is clearly delineated: it stands before us with black solidity, stretching upwards, a terrifying pyramid of gloom and silence. (What weighs most heavily upon our souls is not its bulk, but its silence.) It is without a single light, a single sound, a single sign of life. But everything we do not see we nevertheless feel all the more intensely. The hills in this range are called the Peristeri ridges - "the ridges of the dove." A gentle name for a mountain with such a ferocious soul - a living, billowing, ever-watchful soul which astutely circulates feverishly inside this black pyramid: a cunningly prescient, ever-active soul of numerous components. This is a ridge with untold thousands of shifting eyes which see without being seen, which direct their penetrating stare in our direction day and night. Upon this ridge are untold thousands of hearts throbbing with blind hatred and measuring out our lives with their beats. Each of its pits, boulders, caves and trees conceals one heart over-flowing with mortal enmity and one pair of eyes searching out human flesh for a target. These eyes do not see; they merely take aim, sighting along the "rear-sight elevation notch" and the "front-sight bar". Every depression in this mountain is the lair of a cannon which slowly sways its muzzle to the right and to the left, looking for warm weak flesh. These innumerable, intolerably attentive glances crisscross in the air like the threads of an invisible net which we perceive somehow and which wraps itself around our poor trench, almost smothering its spirit.
[Life in the Tomb, Myrivilis, S.]
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