‘All alone now, Hugh. Oh, Hugh, don’t ever leave me! It’s nothing to die, if you’re with me. It was silly of me to be frightened—when I heard—the guns. I’m not frightened of anything when you’re near me. How warm you are!’

My flesh began to grue and I clenched my teeth to keep them from chattering. Out of vague and dispersed trifles, out of rumours and hints and Duncan’s scanty words, a close and deadly menace raised itself, taking shape and form at the sound of Terry’s terror-stricken voice renouncing fear. I put up my hand to the rock above my head. This rock that pressed down over us, these cliffs that lowered to close us in, assumed the aspect of a portent, and danger, implicit in our way of life, caged us in.

1 OCTOBER

IN A FEWDAYS after that morning when we were wakened by the sound of rifle-fire rain came on with boisterous winds. Now in the general uproar our straining ears could no longer distinguish separate and ambiguous noises, nor constrain each far-off murmur to the likeness of guns beyond the hills. Our ears could not forebode danger while they were deafened with rushing winds and the tumult of waters; our minds, which had been oppressed with the fear of danger coming daily nearer, became calm as the weather rose to wilder storms.

We had been silent in our cave, and preoccupied. The realization of what we craved yet dreaded to know had thrust itself upon us. We saw that as our knowledge increased, so did that which we had fled to avoid come inexorably on, and our calm sunlit haven, untrod and soundless save for late bees and grouse and the roaring stags, assumed the appearance of an arena round which the rage of the world gathered. We were helpless before this thing that stalked into our knowledge, into our hearing, into our sight. Because our imagination could create only vague pictures of what was happening from what we saw and heard, our peril was the vaster. We could conceive of nothing but general ruin to explain the ruin of our garden and Gallovie’s fate. Duncan’s careful warning filled the land with famished troops of desperate men whose strife and clash we heard when that dawn brought the sound of guns.