Shepherds of the night [antikvár]

Preface We shepherded the night as though she were a bevy of girls and we guided her to the ports of dawn with our staffs of rum, our unhewn rods of laughter. And if not for us, punctual with the twilight, lazy wanderers through the fields of moonlight, how would the night, with her lighted stars, her drifting clouds, her mantle of darkness, how would she, lost and alone, find her way through the winding paths of this city of alleys and slopes? On every slope a conjurer's charm, at every corner a mystery, in every nocturnal heart a plea for pity, a pang of iove, the bitter taste of hunger in the silent mouths, and Exu at large in the perilous hour of the crossroads. In our boundless pasturing, we went gathering up the thirst and the hunger, the pleas and the sobs, the dung of suffering and the timid shoots of hope, the sighs of love and the lacerated words of pain, and we prepared a bouquet the color of blood to adorn night's mantle. We traversed the distant roads, the straitest and the most tempting, we reached the frontiers of man's resistance, plumbed his secret, illuminating it with the shades of night, observing its soil and its roots. Night covered all the pettiness and all the grandeur with her mantle, blending them into one single humanity, one single hope. Leading night as soon as she was born on the wharfs, a trembling bird of fear, her wings still damp from the sea, ix