The field is wide and long: no light of habitation flecks its sallow gloom. But the rathe filaments of dawn swirl in its air with more abundance: a gray flush lies close to its black furrows, catches in the grass and brings to it a tremorous stir as if it was a mouth feebly in voice. I walk. The field is wide and long. The field’s horizons lip darkly down, making this murmurous silence of the field a shut dank thing, and I and the white head man imprisoned in it. He still prodding me on, prodding upon the quick of my brain: he who is behind and who is silent.... The ground looms a little ahead. And as it rises, the dead grass ceases underneath my feet. My feet tread sterile clay: they strike on it hard as if the clay were frozen, and yet the air of the field is wet and sultry.... My feet stop. I am at the top of the little loom of the ground. Straight before me an empty shadow. The ground cuts precipitous at my feet. It wreathes about into a semicircle. Below me in the black lies a slakish gleam: a sort of slime within the night: far below. And beyond that, above this bottom of the circling pit yet lower than the crest where I stand, the field goes on over a clutter of broken rocks and stone. I have stopped short at the edge of a limekiln! My feet have held firm! There is rage in me. “So this is where you led me? to my death? to this ridiculous death? I, after Philip LaMotte, after my mother and my father! My death was to be at once more secret and more horrible. No trace of me was to remain. Well: come and push me in. It’ll take more than the pressure of your eyes.” My feet hold firm. The pressure on my cortex fades with my rage, I step back a little and dig a heel into the clay. Then I turn about. The man is closer than I knew: a little below, for I am at the top of the field’s rise. I stare at him and my rage makes a thrust from my eyes down to his beetling form. I challenge him, silent. He is clearer now. I can make out in the dawn the smooth black cloth of his coat tight on his muscular body. I can see well the blind and larval rondure of his face. My rage thrusts at him. He rises from the ground.... “So this is how you dealt your tall man’s blow at Philip LaMotte?” ... and like a bird of prey he planes low up toward me, over my head. I whirl about and facing the kiln I see him slowly plane into its slime. His face remains free and his face is turned toward me. The silence is a texture of half-uttered words: thick, the humid air and the shut field and the kiln make for a silence bulging into sound. The white head is motionless above the kiln. What I hear is his word. But the night speaks it, the night’s silence is the word of this man.