This describes the bizarre nocturnal wanderings of an ordinary man, who left his natural habitat to meet someone who had called him.

It was toward dusk on an August day, in a strangely open and elevated place. From there, one could look out over a vast plain that stretched away indistinctly in the steaming heat, crisscrossed by various roads, occasionally broken by wooded hills. In some places, there were isolated villages and huts.

As night fell, after the sky in the distance had gradually emerged with its fiery red, still laden with a lighter veil, nothing else was happening. Perhaps even the rain that the day's clouds had threatened would not rage.

The general quiet was no longer merely the beginning of a rest. Something had ended, never to begin again as before.

The few distant farmhouses indicated it, no longer glowing with the intermittent insistence of other evenings: all extinguished at the same time, with the same fixedness of the last sign of life they had had. It was also indicated by an imperceptible breath of wind, absent here, which, where a semblance of a familiar landscape could still be discerned, made the tops of trees sway ever so slightly, faintly hinting at the now unusable space of yesterday. Here, in the still sky, a moon that never came was awaited, and the shadow had nothing to impoverish or disanimate, because everything had become still of its own accord.

It would have been impossible to guess what lay beyond, or whether any path, tomorrow illuminated by another light, continued in a presumed direction, beyond known nature.