The silence lasted four hundred endless years. It became the air that generations breathed. It ate into the walls, into the pages, into the rhythm of prayers. It was not emptiness. It was a womb in which there were no thoughts, no images, no words for prayer — only readiness: a pure, unquestioning, absolute receptivity, which sounded at last in the words of her who turned the course of the world’s history:
“Let it be to me according to Thy word1.”
The chapter goes on in the book.