Night With All Her Eyes

The sun had gone, and the poet stood at the edge of the village and watched the Night arrive.

She did not come the way people fear she will. She did not creep in or fall on the houses like a blanket. She came the way a great lady enters a hall, looking about her.

"The goddess Night is coming," the poet said, "and she looks out with all her eyes, on place after place. She has put on all her glories."

Her eyes were everywhere above him, more than he could count, and every one of them was open.

He watched her fill the world. She filled the empty places, the low ground and the high, until the valleys and the heights were full of her.

Now, anybody would expect him to say that the Night brought the darkness. He said the opposite.

"She is immortal, and she has filled the depths and the heights. With her light she drives the darkness away."

For this is the Night of clear skies, the Night who carries lamps. The black that frightens people is something she pushes back.

Behind the poet the village was closing up for the evening.

People had come in from the fields and the paths, and they had come home to the Night as much as to their houses. He put it to her directly.

"Be kind to us tonight. We have come in to you the way birds come to their nest in the tree."

He looked round and counted who was safely in. The villagers had gone to their homes. Everything that walks on feet had gone to rest, and everything that flies. Even the hawks had settled, the greedy ones who hunt all day.

Then he said what every householder was thinking. There was a long stretch of dark to get through.

"Keep the she-wolf away from us, Night. Keep the wolf away, and keep the thief away. Be easy for us to cross."

Easy to cross: he speaks of the Night as a traveller speaks of a river. There is a far bank, and he would like to arrive on it with everything he owns.

By now she was no longer far off in the sky. She was all around him.

"She has come right up to me," he said, "the one who dresses the dark in rich colours."

Then, for one line, he turned to her sister, the one who would be along in a few hours.

"Dawn, cancel it, as a debt is cancelled."

He does not say what is to be cancelled. Perhaps it is the dark, and perhaps it is whatever a person owes at the end of a day.

The hymn ends with the poet standing in front of the goddess, holding out the only thing he has made.

"I have driven these verses to you like a herd of cows," he said. "Accept them, Night, daughter of the Sky. Take my song of praise, as a conqueror takes his due."

The hymn stops there, with the song handed over and the eyes of the Night open above the village.

The Atharvaveda has four hymns to the Night, set one after another. They are less of a picture and more of a prayer said at the door before the bar goes across.

The Night here is very large. "Her far edge cannot be seen," the one praying says. "Everything that stirs goes to rest in her." And he asks, twice over, for the one thing that matters: "Unharmed, may we reach your other side."

Then he does something the Rigveda poet never thought of. He counts her watchers.

"Those who look down on men for you, Night, are ninety-nine. They are eighty-eight. They are seventy-seven." Down he goes, by elevens, sixty-six, fifty-five, forty-four, thirty-three, twenty-two, to eleven at the least. "With these guards, daughter of the Sky, guard us tonight."

After the watchers come the dangers, and he leaves none out.

"Let no thief be master of our cows tonight, nor a wolf of our sheep, nor a robber of our horses. Let the thief run off by the farthest road. Let the rope with teeth keep far away." The rope with teeth is the snake. "Blind the snake, Night. Break the jaws of the wolf. Drive the thief into the snare."

He hands over the house and everything in it. "Whatever we own, and whatever is shut in the chest, we put in your keeping." He even tells her that he knows her secret name, the one the sage Bharadvaja knew.

And then comes the gentlest verse in the four hymns, where the days and nights are a line of hands.

"Night, mother, hand us over to the Dawn. Let the Dawn hand us on to the Day. And let the Day hand us back to you."

He asks to get across the Night as people cross deep water. The mean and the grudging, he adds, can try it without a boat.