noon
The world was bright and beautiful , but he was conscious of an acute pain at the center of his being . That is , he was increasingly hungry . Paul showed equal surprise , and was a prey to the same annoying sensation in an important region . He looked up at the sun , and found that it was almost directly overhead , indicating noon . All the country about them was strange , an unbroken expanse of hill and forest , and nowhere a sign of a human being . They scrutinized the horizon with the keen eyes of boyhood , but they saw no line of smoke , rising from the chimneys of Wareville . Whether the villages lay north or south or east or west of them they did not know , and the wind that sighed so gently through the forest never told .