As I sat there in Southwold overlooking the German Ocean, I sensed a quite clearly the earth's slow turning into the dark. The huntsmen are up in America, wrote Thomas Browne in the "Garden of Cyrus" and they are already past their first sleep in Persia. The shadow of the night is drawn like a black veil across the earth, and since almost all creatures, from one meridian to the next, lie down after the sun has set, so, he continues, one might, in following the setting sun, see on our globe nothing but prone bodies, row upon row, as if leveled by the scythe of Saturnan endless graveyard for a humanity struck by falling sickness.