There was neither sound nor movement. If it had not been for the dim shapes of the beached boats I would have thought that the shriek, the chanting, were figments of a dream. I stood just inside the edge of the forest, with my left arm round a young ash tree and the weight on my right foot, watching with eyes so completely adjusted to the dark of the forest that the mist-illumined island seemed as light as day.

At the foot of the hill, directly at the end of the central avenue, a torch flared suddenly. It lit, momentarily, an opening low in the face of the hill, and clearly in front of this the torchbearer, a figure in a white robe. I saw, then, that what I had taken to be banks of mist in the shadow of the cromlechs were groups of motionless figures also robed in white. As the torch lifted I heard the chanting begin again, very softly, and with a loose and wandering rhythm that was strange to me. Then the torch and its bearer slowly sank earthwards, and I realised that the doorway was a sunken one, and he was descending a flight of steps into the heart of the hill. The others crowded after him, groups clotting, coalescing round the doorway, then vanishing like smoke being sucked into an oven door.

The chanting still went on, but so faint and muffled that it sounded no more than the humming of bees in a winter hive. No tune came through, only the rhythm which sank to a mere throb in the air, a pulse of sound felt rather than heard, which little by little tightened and quickened till it beat fast and hard, and my blood with it . . .

Suddenly, it stopped. There was a pause of dead stillness, but a stillness so charged that I felt my throat knot and swell with tension. I found I had left the trees and stood clear on the turf above the bank, my injury forgotten, my feet planted apart, flat and squarely on the ground, as if my body were rooted through them and straining to pull life from the earth as a tree pulls sap. And like the shoot of a tree growing and thrusting, the excitement in me grew and swelled, beating through somehow from the depths of the island and along the navel cord of the causeway, bursting up through flesh and spirit so that when the cry came at length it was as if it had burst from my own body.

A different cry this time, thin and edged, which might have meant anything, triumph or surrender or pain. A death cry, this time not from the victim, but from the killer.

And after it, silence. The night was fixed and still. The island was a closed hive sealed over whatever crawled and hummed within.