heavens, at evening, began to kindle. Another world was coming to pass,
the cold, rare night. It was dawning in exquisite, icy rose upon the
long mountain-summit opposite. The monks walked backwards and forwards,
talking, in the first undershadow.

And I noticed that up above the snow, frail in the bluish sky, a frail
moon had put forth, like a thin, scalloped film of ice floated out on
the slow current of the coming night. And a bell sounded.

And still the monks were pacing backwards and forwards, backwards and
forwards, with a strange, neutral regularity.

The shadows were coming across everything, because of the mountains in
the west. Already the olive wood where I sat was extinguished. This was
the world of the monks, the rim of pallor between night and day. Here
they paced, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, in the
neutral, shadowless light of shadow.

Neither the flare of day nor the completeness of night reached them,
they paced the narrow path of the twilight, treading in the neutrality
of the law. Neither the blood nor the spirit spoke in them, only the
law, the abstraction of the average. The infinite is positive and
negative. But the average is only neutral. And the monks trod backward
and forward down the line of neutrality.

Meanwhile, on the length of mountain-ridge, the snow grew
rosy-incandescent, like heaven breaking into blossom. After all, eternal
not-being and eternal being are the same. In the rosy snow that shone in
heaven over a darkened earth was the ecstasy of consummation. Night and
day are one, light and dark are one, both the same in the origin and in