Baal: When you lie stretched out in the grass at night, you feel in your bones that the earth is a sphere and that we are flying and that there are animals on this star eating up the plants. It is one of the smaller stars.

Johannes: You know something of astronomy?

Baal: No.

Johannes: I have a mistress. She is the most innocent thing alive, but, in a dream once, I saw her mating with a holly tree: her white body lay stretched out on the holly tree, and the bulbous branches held her in their embrace. I haven’t been able to sleep since.

Baal: Have you looked at her white body yet?

Johannes: No. She is innocent. Even her knees . . . There are many degrees of innocence, aren’t there? And yet sometimes, at night, when I hold her in my arms for a moment, she trembles like a leaf. But only