And Majorat raged against life, caressed his reserve bottle with his lips till out of breath and then, appeased and his mouth dripping, said it was the only way to alleviate his imprisonment.

Then sleep slew words and gestures and thoughts.

I kept repeating some phrase to myself, trying in vain to understand it; and sleep submerged me, ancestral sleep so dreary and so deep that it seems there had only and ever been one long, lone sleep here on earth, above which our few actions float, and which ever returns to fill the flesh of man with night.
Forward! Our nights are torn from us in lots.

The bodies, invaded by caressing poison, and even by confidences and apparitions, shake themselves and stand up again.

We extricate ourselves from the hole, and emerge from the density of buried breath; stumbling we climb into icy space, odorless, infinite space.