I see mountains whose far points are crystal with ice and shot through with the sharp crucifying rose of the sunlight. A snowy delicacy, a tranquillity, lies over these mountains. Their extreme aloof innocence, their milky far fragility which because of its very austerity is not fragile—these mountains will lie for ever for me beyond the snow of the valleys and the foot hills, unattainable because across a space of many hundred miles their unassailable virginity can still be felt. No, even if it is the easier way, and it does not look to be, I can not go by mountains. Has a human foot ever touched that chill, white, remote, indifferent beauty? I think that truthfully the answer is no, and that mine can never do it.

They were his best clothes that Lei has had to let me keep. The tights, covering me from toe to waist, are of well-fitting navy cloth. The shirt is white with long full sleeves and slant-peaked collar and cuffs which are now beginning to lose their starch. The jerkin is a leather thing, reaching below my hips, it’s composed of two squares of leather sewn together with the top left free for the head to go through, the bottom of course unsewn, and two holes left for the arms.

In addition, I have one sandal, which I wear though it means limping. The sandalless foot of the tights is already getting full of holes.

At night the nightmares converge upon me. There is no obstruction on the plain. They rush whispering at me. I hear the whispers when I wake now too. I hear them with my ears in the loneliness. They are beginning to take on their actual reality.

Before me swell the flanks of purple moor, on and on to the jagged Southernmost horizon. I climb from the cup of the valley, and I stand on the brink and watch the ferocious desolation of these plains roll unhurriedly before me. They have no understanding, no pity for the human. Nothing on them will obstruct the whispers. I bring my gaze lower, see every blade of grass, every stone, patch of scrub close to. Every step. You cross a landscape step by step.

I cannot be following the way the army took. They would never have embroiled themselves in the fen-country I’m crossing now. It is growing dusk and I am totally alone. I have sat down to rest here for there is a disturbance in the grey light ahead of me and I fear that the tall—pillar of greyness—that I seem to see at the centre of the disturbance is moving.