“Beyond, I saw the timber and thatch of the village, and the vanishing wooded contours that, across the valley, corresponded to my vantage point. All these woods, though my footsteps never startled anything larger than a squirrel, still teem with wild boar. As it declined, the sun beat the grey Norman stone into thin edifices of gold; and, when dusk had swallowed them up, the buildings of the monastery were pierced by many gleaming windows–oblong and classical, Norman and rounded, or high tangles of Gothic tracery–as the Abbey prepared itself for the night.”
Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time to Keep Silence (1957; repr., New York: New York Review of Books, 2007), 40.
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