inds do:
he responded to its farewell, he felt its beauty, and as little winds
turned cool and the shine of blades of grass faded, making all the
plain dimmer, he heard, or believed he heard, further off than he could
see, sounds on the plain beyond ridges, in hollows, behind clumps of
bushes; as though small creatures all unknown to his learning played
instruments cut from reeds upon unmapped streams. In this hour, among
these fancies, Rodriguez saw clear on a hill the white walls of the
village of Lowlight. And now they began to notice that a great round
moon was shining. The sunset grew dimmer and the moonlight stole in
softly, as a cat might walk through great doors on her silent feet into
a throne-room just as the king had gone: and they entered the village
slowly in the perfect moment of twilight.

The round horizon was brimming with a pale but magical colour, welling
up to the tips of trees and the battlements of white towers. Earth
seemed a mysterious cup overfull of this pigment of wonder. Clouds
wandering low, straying far from their azure fields, were dipped in it.
The towers of Lowlight turned slowly rose in that light, and glowed
together with the infinite gloaming, so that for this brief hour the
things of man were wed with the things of eternity. It was into this
wide, pale flame of aetherial rose that the moon came stealing like a
magician on tip-toe, to enchant the tips of the trees, low clouds and
the towers of Lowlight. A blue light from beyond our world touched the
pink that is Earth's at evening: and what was strange and a matter for
hushed voices, marvellous but yet of our earth, became at that touch
unearthly. All in a moment it was, and Rodriguez gasped to see it. Even
Morano's eyes grew round with the coming of wonder, or with some dim
feeling that an unnoticed moment had made all things strange and new.

For some moments the spell of moonlight on sunlight hovered: the air
was brimming and quivering with it: magic touched earth. For some
moments, some thirty beats of a heron's wing, had the angels sung to
men, had their songs gone earthward into that rosy glow, gliding past
layers of faintly tinted cloud, like moths at dusk towards a
briar-rose; in those few moments men would have known their language.
Rodriguez reined in his horse in the heavy silence and waited. For what
he waited he knew not: some unearthly answer perhaps to his questioning
thoughts that had wandered far from earth, though n