...of waking

Yet there were moments when waves of tenderness swept over her. But she was troubled by the unknown life bottled up in this body, the unknown dreams under the solid bone of the forehead. Sprawled at an angle across his chest, she could feel the man's respiration rising and falling like a wave, with the restlessness of an ocean crossing. Placing her ear against his skin, she could hear the hard beat of the heart, thumping like a motor, like the pound of a wreckers hammer. And the silence which ensued each time she uttered a word which pulled him from a dream. She counted the seconds between question and reply, as in a storm between the flash and the thunder - one ... two ... three ... He's already yonder, far beyond those fields. When he closed his eyes, she lifted up his head with her two hands, and found it as heavy as a dead man's, as heavy as a stone. 'What misery, my love!'

Strange fellow-voyager, this! Stretched out side by side without a word. With life flowing through you like a river. And the body, in a dizzying flight, launched on it like a dug-out canoe.

[Southern Mail, Saint-Exupery, A. d.]