"They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and cased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing."Wonderful sentence about a start of a journey in All the Pretty Horses /Cormac McCarthy.... a start of an adventure into a landscape that's mythical as much as real.... all part of the American dream - early 19th century American landscape painters and their vision of the sublime (anything possible in this grand and awesome new world - as indeed it was.
Frederick Church/Twilight in the Wilderness
