...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.]