But I had pledged myself to that, and soon I was on the outskirts of the plain. Emerging from the crowded city, my heart and eyes numb, I met the shambles of the plain and realized only then that I had seen nothing as I traversed the streets.

The plain looked like the heaving chest of a prone giant, but this was not because the earthquake was still continuing. The ground at the edges of the great brand-new gaping fissures was still trembling, and every now and then a clod would drop thundering to the bottom—otherwise the movement came from thousands of crawling or upright men and animals, helping each other out of the fissures, giving a shifting appearance to the edges of the several immense mounds which hadn’t existed last time I was here.

The row was terrible, screams of wounded men, and frightened animals which careered around increasing the numbers of the wounded, and the cries of those caught in the cracks.

Large black sky-birds were already wheeling above it all, uttering harsh cries, and increasingly landing on mounds and settling down to gorge.

Enormous grave-pits were being dug, and corpses tipped in: other units were building pyres of corpses and firing them, which smelt horrible.

I noted an odd disturbance and went nearer. Then I saw that some people were watching, some feebly dragging themselves out of the area of a fight between two great birds, riderless, the elaborate harness awry on their bodies like a signature of man’s attempt to subjugate such elemental force: it was not the birds but the harness which looked ridiculous.

They had obviously met after the excitement of the battle and something had slashed them mutually into one of those characteristic rages. Unlike fights between other species of bird, there would have been very little ogling or fighting shy; they would have darted right in at each other with immediate savagery. Horrid murder-eager barks, thick blood and big, curved feathers hit the air.

I don’t think I was watching so much as I stood in that thin ring of spectators, I was waiting. I had known it would be, even before I recognized the one-eyed, black bird—the other was a speckled grey with half its crest torn off—and I stood there, wind in my hair and clothes, various aspects of the death-smell everywhere, the blood coursing through my veins while I stood—For yes, all comes to that blood, to me; I had been given the statuette by what seemed the luckiest coincidence, and now that I was about to start on a journey it was really about time I sank my fear of the bird—and here it was. It would be very useful, when it had done with this fight.