...of the threat of death

We remain huddled together on the veranda, clinging to one another, warily observing the far end of the garden and the sky where once more large black clouds are gathering. There is that strange silence again, weighing down upon the valley around us as if we were all alone in the world. Cook’s hut is empty. He left for Black River this morning with his wife. In the fields, not a cry, no sound of a carriage to be heard.
It’s that silence penetrating deep down inside us, that ominous silence, bearing the threat of death that I’ll never be able to forget. There’s not a bird in the trees, not an insect, not even the sound of the wind in the she-oaks. The silence is more powerful than the sounds, it swallows them up, and everything around us drains away and is annihilated. We stand still on the veranda. I’m shivering in my damp clothes. When we speak our voices ring out strangely in the distance and our words are immediately eclipsed.

[The Prospector, Le Clézio, J. M. G.]