In the first hour they shortened by fifteen miles the length of their rambling quest.  In the next hour they did five miles; and in the third hour ten.  After this they rode slowly.  The sun was setting.  Morano regarded the sunset with delight, for it seemed to promise jovially the end of his sufferings, which except for brief periods when they went on foot, to rest—­as Rodriguez said—­the horses, had been continuous and even increasing since they started.  Rodriguez, perhaps a little weary too, drew from the sunset a more sombre feeling, as sensitive minds 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 no words came to him with which to ask their question and he did not know what question they would ask.  He was all vibrating with the human longing:  I know not what it is, but perhaps philosophers know.  He sat there waiting while a late bird sailed homeward, sat while Morano wondered.  And nothing spake from anywhere.