Goodnight, Dinosaurs

When it grows dark in the valley, everything settles down to sleep in its turn. First the dragonflies over the water go quiet, because in the dark they cannot see where they are flying anyway. Then the small lizards tuck themselves away, each into its own crack between the warm stones. Then the wind in the horsetails dies down. And at the very end, one after another, the dinosaurs fall asleep — and every one of them does it a little differently.

The great long-necked dinosaurs fall asleep standing up. They are too heavy to lie down and get up several times in a night, so they simply close their eyes exactly where they were standing when it went dark. From a distance they look like calm dark hills that somebody has attached very long necks to. Every so often one of them shifts from foot to foot and sleeps on.

The spiky dinosaurs with plates along their backs lie down on their sides and always close together, so that the plates touch like tiles on a roof. It looks like one long spiky wall. Nobody in the valley walks between them at night, and they know it perfectly well, and that is exactly why they sleep so soundly that they do not stir until morning.

The small quick dinosaurs sleep in a nest of dry leaves, six or seven at a time. They curl into such a heap that there is no telling where one ends and the next begins: nothing but tails, feet and shut eyes. In the morning it always takes a good while before they untangle, and somebody always treads on somebody else in the process.

The dinosaurs with flat beaks like a duck's sleep right by the water, as close to the river as they can get. They like to hear it through their sleep. When the water rushes evenly, it means nothing is happening in the valley and they can go on sleeping. And when the rushing changes even slightly they wake at once, all of them together, lift their heads and listen — and only when the river has gone back to its usual sound do they lie down again.