Writing about night – Elizabeth Kay

Night is the time when sabre tooths and cave bears were out and about, and our eyesight was not as well adapted as theirs was. Night is scary, which is probably an evolutionary adaptation for keeping human beings safely in their caves when predators were out and about. These days the most dangerous night-time predators are leopards, crocodiles, vipers and mosquitoes. And other humans.

Fear is a natural response that triggers an adrenaline rush and results in the same fight-or-flight response that anger does: your heart rate and breathing quicken, your breathing becomes shallow, you feel flushed, your muscles tense up, you feel shaky, and weak at the knees. With fear, you might also find that you become dizzy or lightheaded, feel nauseous, and experience pain, tightness or heaviness in the chest. Fear causes specific behaviour patterns so that we can cope in adverse or unexpected situations that threaten our wellbeing or survival – like a fire or a physical attack. It’s a familiar emotion because it’s something everyone has experienced at one time or another. The next time something scares you, reflect on it in your next moment of calm and write it down. There’s nothing quite like personal experience to add authenticity to your prose.

 Many writers have described night in detail, and it’s very rarely about how lovely and peaceful it is. The scent of the honeysuckle, the song of the nightingale, the starlit sky. No, it’s adrenaline rush all the way. One of my favourite pieces of writing is a passage in Conan Doyle’s Lost World, set on a plateau in South America where dinosaurs still survived. My main problem in believing this story as a teenager was the description of the sheer sides of the table-topped mountain. Surely not? And then, in 2008, I visited Venezuela and saw them for myself where they are called tepuis. Many are still unexplored. As each tepui has been isolated from the rest of the world for a very long time, many of the species found on them are unique. Conan Doyle knew this, and made the most of it…

It was dreadful in the forest. The trees grew so thickly and their foliage spread so widely that I could see nothing of the moonlight save that here and there the high branches made a tangled filigree against the starry sky. As the eyes became more used to the obscurity one learned that there were different degrees of darkness among the trees – that some were dimly visible, while between them and among them there were coal-black shadowed patches, like the mouths of caves, from which I shrank in horror as I passed. I thought of the despairing yell of the tortured iguanodon – that dreadful cry which had echoed through the woods. I thought, too, of the glimpse I had had in the light of Lord John’s torch of that bloated, warty, blood-slavering muzzle. Even now I was on its hunting ground. At any instant it might spring upon me from the shadows – this nameless and horrible monster…

 I think this a master class on night terrors. The difficulty of discerning black shapes against a black background, the loss of the most important sense of all when it comes to self-preservation. The possibility of getting lost as a consequence. The memories that loom large and only add to the fear factor. And the difficulty of backing up other sensory impressions with visual corroboration….

 …I was plodding up the slope, turning these thoughts over in my mind, and had reached a point which may have been half-way to home, when my mind was brought back to my own position by a strange noise behind me. It was something between a snore and a growl, low, deep, and exceedingly menacing. Some strange creature was evidently near me, but nothing could be seen, so I hastened more rapidly upon my way. I had traversed half a mile or so when suddenly the sound was repeated, still behind me, but louder and more menacing than before. My heart stood still within me as it flashed across me that the beast, whatever it was, must surely be after me. My skin grew cold and my hair rose at the thought. That these monsters should tear each other to pieces was a part of the strange struggle for existence, but that they should turn upon modern man, that they should deliberately track and hunt down the predominant human was a staggering and fearsome thought…

 A very Victorian view! But it’s the sounds that really worry him. Once he sees the creature he hesitates before running away, which was clearly the wrong thing to do. So that’s another way of ratcheting up the tension. Make the wrong decision.

Talking to my guide in Namibia last year, I asked him what scared him the most. He didn’t hesitate. “A leopard. They hunt at night, and they always approach silently from behind. You don’t stand a chance.” Jim Corbett, the guy who hunted man-eaters in India and wrote some wonderful books about it give the best descriptions of being stalked I have ever read. His observations on the differing behaviours of dogs and men are very interesting. This extract are his thoughts after both he and his dog Robin were charged by a wounded leopard, after hearing “a succession of deep-throated, angry grunts”:

Our reactions to the sudden and quite unexpected danger that had confronted us were typical of how a canine and a human being act in as emergency when the danger that threatens us is heard, and not seen. In Robin’s case, it had impelled him to seek safety in silent and rapid retreat; whereas in my case, it had the effect of gluing my feet to the ground and making retreat – rapid or otherwise – impossible.

An interesting observation. I suspect that also, at night, a dog has better vision than a human and the danger of tripping and falling is far greater for someone on two legs rather than four. How many films have you seen of women running through a forest at night, followed by the inevitable fall? It’s such a cliché, but it always works. The primeaval remains inside us to this day. Night has been very different through the ages. From the darkness of it in the Patheolithic to the artificially neon-lit night of cities worldwide today, our evolutionary heritage hasn’t gone. Night is still a good concealer for all manner of crimes, but these days they’re by other human beings rather than man-eaters.

But has anyone captured night as poetically as Dylan Thomas in Under Milk Wood?

It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless

and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched,

courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the

sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbing sea…