Then the leader—I assumed it was he, though this time the torch was out—appeared suddenly like a ghost in the doorway and mounted the steps. The rest came behind, moving not as people move in a procession, but slowly and smoothly, in groups breaking and forming, contained in pattern like a dance, till once more they stood parted into two ranks beside the cromlechs.

Again complete stillness. Then the leader raised his arms. As if at a signal, white and shining like a knife-blade, the edge of the moon showed over the hill.

The leader cried out, and this, the third cry, was unmistakably a call of triumphant greeting, and he stretched his arms high above his head as if offering up what he held between his hands.

The crowd answered him, chant and counterchant. Then as the moon lifted clear of the hill, the priest lowered his arms and turned. What he had offered to the goddess, he now offered to the worshippers. The crowd closed in.

I had been so intent on the ceremony at the centre of the island that I had not watched the shore, or realised that the mist, creeping higher, was now blurring the avenue itself. My eyes, straining through the dark, saw the white shapes of the people as part of the mist that clotted, strayed, and eddied here and there in knots of white.

Presently I became aware that this, in fact, was what was happening. The crowd was breaking apart, and the people, in twos and threes, were passing silently down the avenue, in and out of the barred shadows which the rising moon painted between the stones. They were making for the boats.

I have no idea how long it had all taken, but as I came to myself I found that I was stiff, and where I had allowed my cloak to fall away I was soaked with the mist. I shook myself like a dog, backing again into the shelter of the trees. Excitement had spilled out of me, spirit as well as body in a warm gush down my thighs, and I felt empty and ashamed. Dimly I knew that this was something different; this had not been the force I had learnt to receive and foster, nor was this spilled-out sensation the aftermath of power. That had left me light and free and keen as a cutting blade; now I felt empty as a licked pot still sticky and smelling with what it had held.