Nocturne
A midsummer night in our English countryside, when the twilight never quite fades, and the inward lampglow of the flowers dies away only after dawn, is something that eludes description. The artist Samuel Palmer captured a little of the magic. It was a constant theme, and a challenge, for Tennyson.
During the double summer-time of war, with daylight prolonged past bedtime, we lost the habit of lingering out of doors after sunset. But this year has given us night after night, fcllowing shower-washed days, in which to absorb the music of this never-cloying nocturne.
I stood last night beneath the intricate scaffolding which still mantles the back of the house, after doodle-bomb repairs. I watched the bats flittering about, weaving their threadless pattern round the poles and planks. How did they always avoid collision amongst such intricacies? I felt, rather tan saw, one crazy little pipistrelle making straight for my face. The leathery creak, the sensation of beaten air, made me blink. He dived to within an inch or two of my eyes, then swerved aside. Could he see the pallid- gleam of that strange, shadowy and sinister object, the human visage? But by the proverb a bat is nearly blind. -No, he has apparently some other device than sight. Scientists have recently been experimenting in the laboratory and have found that the bat while flying emits, from special membranes, a supersonic vibration, a high-frequency sound-wave that echoes back from any approaching solid object and is caught by another set of membranes. So the bat, and not man, was first in the use of radar and asdic.
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