...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.]