Ambrosius had asked me if this had been “an arrow out of the dark”. I had told him yes, and this was true, but I had yet to find out why I had been brought here. All I knew was that, now I was here, I wished myself away. I had felt something of the same thing in Brittany as I first passed among the avenues of stones; a breathing on the back of the neck as if something older than time were looking over one’s shoulder; but this was not quite the same. It was as if the ground, the stones that I touched, though still warm from the spring sunlight, were breathing cold from somewhere deep below.

Half reluctantly, I walked forward. The light was going rapidly, and to pick one’s way into the centre needed care. Time and storm—and perhaps the gods of war—had done their work, and many of the stones were cast down to lie haphazard, but the pattern could still be discerned. It was a circle, but like nothing I had seen in Brittany, like nothing I had even imagined. There had been, originally, an outer circle of the huge stones, and where a crescent of these still stood I saw that the uprights were crowned with a continuous lintel of stones as vast as themselves, a great linked curve of stone, standing like a giants’ fence across the sky. Here and there others of the outer circle were still standing, but most had fallen, or were leaning at drunken angles, with the lintel stones beside them on the ground. Within the bigger circle was a smaller one of uprights, and some of the outer giants had fallen against these and brought them flat. Within these again, marking the centre, was a horse-shoe of enormous stones, crowned in pairs. Three of these trilithons stood intact; the fourth had fallen, and brought its neighbour down with it. Echoing this once again, was an inner horse-shoe of smaller stones, nearly all standing. The centre was empty, and crossed with shadows.