One summer night, the novelist EF Benson motors lyrically to London. “When we started, the crimson of the sunset was still aflame in the west, but gradually the colour was withdrawn, as if some unseen hand was pulling out scarlet threads that ran through some exquisite fabric of dainty embroidery, leaving there only the soft transparent ground of it. Then more gradually, so that the eye could not trace the appearance of each, but only knew that the number was being multiplied, behind the dark velvet of the sky were lit the myriad suns that make a flame of space, and sing in their orbits,” he writes in A Reaping (1909).
“The roads were empty of traffic, and though July was here, still from dark coppice and leafy screen there sounded the one eternal song, the rapture of nightingales. Often it seemed to me as if we were standing still, while the world in its revolution span by us,” continues the creator of the Mapp and Lucia novels.
“It seemed in the darkness that time had ceased, and that from its own impetus this globe and the thousand globes above were circling still. Then in front there began to shine, like the reflected light of some comet coming nearer, the huge glow-worm of London.”
