Rising, with the monks, at 2.00 AM, for Matins. The vaulting of the church half-concealed in darkness, a single candle flickering before the altar, the monks themselves scarcely visible in the gloom.

The long wait for the light. The slow measures of psalmody rising and falling.

Then came the Lauds, full of hope for the rising sun, for the figurative coming of Christ, to banish the darkness.

Then they hailed the risen sun – the risen Christ, and asked god for the grace that would sustain them in their day’s work. And out the monks went to the woods and the pastures. And out he went, too, into the pastures.

And it was there, in the full sun, that the monks chanted the hours, as they split wood or dug in the garden, as they tanned hides, or pruned fruit trees – it was there, sometimes, that they would chant among the wheat-sheaves in the rows of vines.