...of the progress of time

Then he stopped wondering anything at all, and at the same time stopped seeing although he made himself keep his eyes open and sit as straight as possible on his saddle while the kind of dark slime in which he seemed to be moving grew still thicker, and it was completely dark and all he could make out now was the sound, the monotonous and multiple hammering of the hoofs on the road echoing, increasing (hundreds, thousands of hoofs now) until (like the pattering of the rain) it effaced and destroyed itself, engendering by its continuity, its uniformity, like a kind of silence to the second power, something majestic, something monumental: the progress of time itself, that is, invisible immaterial with neither beginning nor end nor point of reference and at the heart of which he had the sensation of remaining frozen, stiff on his horse that was also invisible in the darkness among the phantoms of cavalrymen whose invisible and tall figures slipped by horizontally swaying or rather slouching faintly as the horses jolted so that the squadron the whole regiment seemed to advance without progression, like those pantomimists whose legs imitate the movement of walking while behind them a trembling canvas backdrop unrolls on which are painted houses trees clouds, with this difference that here the canvas backdrop was only the night, blackness,…

[The Flanders Road, Simon, C.]