There are alleys and street corners and shop entrances where the darkness appears to collect in a solid mass. There are secluded squares where night makes a weird sound of its own stillness. There are buildings, monuments and statues that, at a distance, and in the absence of people, pulsate mysteriously in the sepulchral light. There are critters that slope and trot across the road as you interrupt their attempts to pillage scraps from upended bins.

And, from time to time, there are the faintly sinister silhouettes of other solitary individuals – as threatened by your presence, no doubt, as you are by theirs. However efficiently artificial light annihilates the difference between night and day, it never wholly eliminates the primitive suspicion that night people are up to no good.
It is easy to feel disoriented in the city at the dead of night, especially if you are tired from roaming its distances. For in the darkness, above all perhaps in familiar or routine places, everything acquires a subtly different form or volume.
The city is at its most earthly and unearthly at night.