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Updated: June 4, 2025
A fire-blackened plain, and above it a frowning mountain, and that mountain thick, thick with dead, thousands and thousands and thousands of dead, among which the hyenas wandered and the night-birds screamed. He could see their faces, many of them he knew again as those of living men whom he had met in Jerusalem and elsewhere, or had noted with the army.
Every other sound was hushed; the voices of the night-birds were stilled; even the frogs along the shore suspended their bellowing, and all nature seemed listening to the new harmony that thus fell like enchantment upon the repose of midnight.
True, there were the usual night-sounds of the country the whir of night-birds, the buzzing of insects, the barking of distant dogs, the mellow lowing of far-off kine but these didn't seem to break the stillness, they only intensified it, and added a grewsome melancholy to it into the bargain.
As I was there, I deposited the garbage by the side of the little corpse, knowing she would resume her watch, and retired. My friend who had put up her parcels was prepared to go. She thanked me with a smile as she went out, looking carefully round lest she had missed out some other night-birds.
The usual stillness of the night, and the solitude of the wilderness the croaking of the night-birds, the movement of every leaf, animated as it is by the myriads of nocturnal insects that fill the atmosphere the brilliant and fleeting fire-flies traversing the gloom the strange animals wandering in their nightly prowlings the approach of the grunting hogs, and the incidents of the hunt: all these things, combined with the idea of isolation when a man finds himself alone in the wilds of a scarcely pervious forest, create an inexpressible feeling of mingled fear, pleasure, and anxiety.
Beautiful dames in brocade with coifs of lace; seigneurs bedizzened from top to toe; peasants in flowered jackets like those of our grandfathers, everything with an ancient air, faded, dusty, worn-out. Now and then the night-birds, habitual dwellers in the chapel, awakened by all these lights, winged about the candles, whose flames mounted straight and vague as if they burnt behind gauze.
Robin Turgis raised his hands in a comical despair as he muttered: "Here is the devil out of hell again." All the men and women were looking eagerly at the door. "Who is this?" asked Louis of Tristan, "whose coming seems so to flutter these night-birds?" "The strangest knave in all Paris," Tristan answered.
The plaintive cries of the night-birds alone break the gloomy silence of the desolate region, and the shadowy thicket stretching in every direction produces a depressing effect upon the feelings. Chancellorsville is in the centre of this singular territory, on the main road, or rather roads, running from Orange Court-House to Fredericksburg, from which latter place it is distant about ten miles.
On the horizon the great light on the Metropolitan Tower flashed the hour of midnight. As I let myself in, it occurred to me that Mr. Carville would be walking to and fro, smoking a meditative pipe beneath the stars, his thoughts, no doubt, flying westward like enigmatic night-birds, and hovering above the home towards which he was speeding.
He got up, however, and as there came no more crows, or night-birds like the bats that flew out at the same time with the crows, the cousin and Sancho giving him rope, he lowered himself into the depths of the dread cavern; and as he entered it Sancho sent his blessing after him, making a thousand crosses over him and saying, "God, and the Pena de Francia, and the Trinity of Gaeta guide thee, flower and cream of knights-errant.
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