The whirling dry leaves ceased to be his main preoccupation and became a mere memory. The bareness of the place made the simplicity of its shape obvious, and he saw wrongness in that. It had been nothing to him in the beginning when he had had so much red beauty to beguile him, but now that he had seen the complexity of shapes that emerged from the concerted movements of the dry leaves and that the stars described in the night sky, he thought it wrong that the ground itself should have a form so plain. So he dissolved adamant into chaos for a brief time, during which he elevated the park, and made the street climb to it, and let the forest slope away on its other side. The street was too straight and so he allowed it to bend this way and that. The slope of the forest he complicated and made more perfect by making it tend up and down in places, like the surface of a leaf when it has begun to turn brown and has ceased to be flat. In like manner he indented the face of the ground with grooves and connected them in a way that recalled the branchings of the veins in a leaf. When it was shaped to his liking, he made it adamant once more, fixing it thus. Now when he looked one way from the park he could see the street curving this way and that as it descended the slope, and when he looked the other way, he could see the white ground of the forest, scratched with the countless brown branches of the trees, heaving up in some places, and in others plunging into the declivities that were shot through its flesh.

Something told him that the time had come to bring the street, the park, and the forest back to their original form (though with greater perfection). As when the leaves had refused to go away, he did not have any thought of what to do about the deep snow (as he had named the white stuff) but then one day he noted that no flakes had fallen from the sky for a while and that the level of the snow was descending the trunks of the trees. Patches of ground appeared, then grew until little, then no snow was left.