Approaching slow over the fen, cautious, having to know but terrified of seeing, I came to the thicker greyness on the small island-patch. It was a tower which had been built there and long since rotted half away—a single pile of masonry, architecture unbelievably ancient, perhaps dating from the era before the moon fell, purposeless now. I did not like to look too closely, for the bleakness of the rotted walls and fallen archways horrified me as if aeons-long loneliness had accumulated there like a disease. The disturbance I had seen was a nation, a cloud, of bats all about it, in the evening, and the bats wheeling out of the windows drew with them in the wind of their wheeling the long grey cobwebs draping the windows’ inner sides.

I hurried past at a safe distance, my breathing shallow so as not to inhale any of the lonely ages.

I am at the mercy of the demoniac night.

The fungi hang in great dripping blankets from the boughs, and when the breeze takes them they shuffle or whisper, in an urgent way. I think that they are shapes stalking me, stealthy, occasionally moving, and the whispers are almost intelligible words now, it is an effort not to hear them. I must not, I must not hear the words of the whispers. All my Gods, and the Creator of Gods and men, the Father of all, the High Deep God, help me.

But what is this sweetness falling through the trees? It is just the coming of day, and day is terrible for it presages the coming of night.

The purple flanks of the purple moors are flattening to bronze, and they no longer roll, they climb upwards to the rim of the world once more. The plain sweeps day by day to its end. The winds hurtle and howl across it, hurtling and howling Northwards. I have come to the beginnings of the winds, I watch them believe they dominate the cruel plains, but I know their endings, I know how the wideness of the plain-land defeats them simply by its existence, too contemptuous even to use an effort, and the winds are dispersed over the plains I come from, and are unnoticeable.

Every day I must braid my hair anew, and wind it round my head because of the winds.

The winds are my friends against the whispers. In the normal moanings and groanings and gurnings and squealings of the boisterous winds, all meaning nothing in the long run, the whispers cannot be heard.

There is no trace of the army’s great passing before me, though I know they must have reached the rim at about this place. It must have been quite a time ago. I have not kept count of the days.