Then Peter, drinking tea and munching crumbs, sat up in his bag and looked at what Rodney described as the morning.  He saw how the long, pointed olive leaves stood with sharp edges against pale light; how the silver screen was, if one looked into it, a thing of magic details of delight, of manifold shapes and sharp little shadowings and delicate tracery; how gnarled stems were light-touched and shadow-touched and silver and black; how the night was delicate, marvellous, a radiant wonder of clear loveliness, illustrated by a large white moon.  Peter saw it and smiled.  He did not see Rodney’s world, but his own.

But both saw how the large moon dipped and dipped.  Soon it would dip below the dim land’s rim, and the olive trees would be blurred and twisted shadows in a still shadow-world.

“Then,” said Peter dreamily, “we shall be able to go to sleep again.”

Rodney pulled him out of his bag and firmly rolled it up.

“Twelve kilometres from breakfast.  Thirty from tea.  No, we don’t tea before Florence.  Go and wash.”

They washed in a copper bucket that hung beside a pulley well.  It was rather fun washing, till Peter let the bucket slip off the hook and gurgle down to the bottom.  Then it was rather fun fishing for it with the hook, but it was not caught, and they abandoned it in sudden alarm at a distant sound, and hastily scrambled out of the olive garden onto the white road.

Beneath their feet lay the thick soft dust, unstirred as yet by the day’s journeyings.  The wayfaring smell of it caught at their breath.  Before them the pale road wound and wound, between the silver secrecy of the olive woods, towards the journeying moon that dipped above a far and hidden city in the west.  Then a dim horizon took the dipping moon, and there remained a grey road that smelt of dust and ran between shadowed gardens that showed no more their eternal silver, but gnarled and twisted stems that mocked and leered.

One traveller stepped out of his clear circle of illumined values into the shrouded dusk of the old accustomed mystery, and the road ran faint to his eyes through a blurred land, and he had perforce to take up again the quest of the way step by step.  Reality, for a lucid space of time emerging, had slipped again behind the shadow-veils.  The ranks of the wan olives, waiting silently for dawn, held and hid their secret.

The other traveller murmured, “How many tones of grey do you suppose there are in an olive tree when the moon has set?  But there’ll be more presently.  Listen....”

The little wind that comes before the dawn stirred and shivered, and disquieted the silence of the dim woods.  Peter knew how the stirred leaves would be shivering white, only in the dark twilight one could not see.

The dusk paled and paled.  Soon one would catch the silver of up-turned leaves.

On the soft deep dust the treading feet of the travellers moved quietly.  One walked with a light unevenness, a slight limp.