eight at night before
And as they turned down from the knoll to rejoin their comrades , the sun dipped and disappeared , and the woods fell instantly into the gravity and greyness of the early night . The night fell upon the Prince while he was threading green tracks in the lower valleys of the wood ; and though the stars came out overhead and displayed the interminable order of the pine-tree pyramids , regular and dark like cypresses , their light was of small service to a traveller in such lonely paths , and from thenceforth he rode at random . The austere face of nature , the uncertain issue of his course , the open sky and the free air , delighted him like wine ; and the hoarse chafing of a river on his left sounded in his ears agreeably . It was past eight at night before his toil was rewarded and he issued at last out of the forest on the firm white high-road . It lay downhill before him with a sweeping eastward trend , faintly bright between the thickets ; and Otto paused and gazed upon it . So it ran , league after league , still joining others , to the farthest ends of Europe , there skirting the sea-surge , here gleaming in the lights of cities ; and the innumerable army of tramps and travellers moved upon it in all lands as by a common impulse , and were now in all places drawing near to the inn door and the night 's rest . The pictures swarmed and vanished in his brain ; a surge of temptation , a beat of all his blood , went over him , to set spur to the mare and to go on into the unknown for ever .