Our unnamed narrator might as well be the only person alive. He knows he's not – he still goes down to the nearest inhabited village to buy things to eat and other necessities, and he sees planes spreading their contrails over the remote area he lives in – but he might as well be. A lot of his thoughts are about life, however, for he has little to do except notice the nature around him, from the smell of lilies burgeoning with nobody else to see them in this deserted village, to the swallows darting across the ravines of the countryside. Life – and the nature of a light that he sees spring into activity every night at what he thought was a totally lifeless, empty forest area on land separated from his lookout post in his back garden by a deep, wooded gorge…