A cricket hopped near me. Then I remembered that it was Saturday
afternoon, when a strange suspension comes over the world. And then,
just below me, I saw two monks walking in their garden between the
naked, bony vines, walking in their wintry garden of bony vines and
olive trees, their brown cassocks passing between the brown vine-stocks,
their heads bare to the sunshine, sometimes a glint of light as their
feet strode from under their skirts.

It was so still, everything so perfectly suspended, that I felt them
talking. They marched with the peculiar march of monks, a long, loping
stride, their heads together, their skirts swaying slowly, two brown
monks with hidden hands, sliding under the bony vines and beside the
cabbages, their heads always together in hidden converse. It was as if I
were attending with my dark soul to their inaudible undertone. All the
time I sat still in silence, I was one with them, a partaker, though I
could hear no sound of their voices. I went with the long stride of
their skirted feet, that slid springless and noiseless from end to end
of the garden, and back again. Their hands were kept down at their
sides, hidden in the long sleeves, and the skirts of their robes. They
did not touch each other, nor gesticulate as they walked. There was no
motion save the long, furtive stride and the heads leaning together. Yet
there was an eagerness in their conversation. Almost like
shadow-creatures ventured out of their cold, obscure element, they went
backwards and forwards in their wintry garden, thinking nobody could
see them.

Across, above them, was the faint, rousing dazzle of snow. They never
looked up. But the dazzle of snow began to glow as they walked, the
wonderful, faint, ethereal flush of the long range of snow in the