Then he stopped wondering anything at all, and at the same time stopped seeing although he made himself keep his eyes open and sit as straight as possible on his saddle while the kind of dark slime in which he seemed to be moving grew still thicker, and it was completely dark and all he could make out now was the sound, the monotonous and multiple hammering of the hoofs on the road echoing, increasing (hundreds, thousands of hoofs now) until (like the pattering of the rain) it effaced, destroyed itself, engendering by its continuity, its uniformity, like a kind of silence to the second power, something majestic, something monumental: the progress of time itself, that is, invisible immaterial with neither beginning nor end nor point of reference and at the heart of which he had the sensation of remaining frozen, stiff on his horse that was also invisible in the darkness among the phantoms of cavalrymen whose invisible and tall figures slipped by horizontally swaying or rather slouching faintly as the horses jolted so that the squadron the whole regiment seemed to advance without progression, like those pantomimists whose legs imitate the movement of walking while behind them a trembling canvas backdrop unrolls on which are painted houses trees clouds, with this difference that here the canvas backdrop was only the night, blackness, and at one point the rain began falling, it too monotonous, infinite and black, and not falling but like the night itself uniting in its depths men and horses, adding mingling its imperceptible patter to that enormous patient and dangerous murmur of thousands of horses on the roads, like the nibbling sound thousands of insects would make gnawing away the world (besides, don’t the horses, the old army horses, the ancient and immemorial hacks that walk through the rain at night along the roads, shaking their heavy heads, don’t they have something crustacean, the stiffness of shellfish about them, that vaguely ridiculous vaguely frightening look of grasshoppers with their stiff legs their projecting bones their ringed flanks suggesting the image of some heraldic beast made not of flesh and muscles but instead like—animal and armour united, combined—those old rickety carriages with metal sides and rusty fittings, clattering, mended with a few pieces of wire, threatening to fall to pieces at any moment?) a murmur which in Georges’s mind had finally become identified with the very notion of war, the monotonous trampling that filled the night like a clatter of bones, the black air harsh as metal against their faces, so that he seemed to feel (remembering those accounts of polar expeditions where the skin was described sticking to frozen iron) the cold solidified shadows sticking to his flesh, as if the air and time itself were only a single, solid mass of chilly steel (like those dead worlds extinct for billions of years and covered with ice) in whose density they were caught, immobilized for ever, their old walking horsemeat beneath them, their spurs, their sabres, their steel weapons: everything standing and intact, like the day when he would wake and discover them through the transparent, glaucous thickness appearing like an army on the march surprised by a cataclysm and which a slow invisibly advancing glacier would restore, would spit out a hundred or two hundred thousand years from now pell-mell with all the old lansquenets, reiters and cuirassiers of long ago tumbling down breaking in a faint tinkle of glass . . .