In half an hour a man came out of one of the houses and ferried me across in silence. I asked him also if he had heard of the Griffin. He laughed and shook his head as the first one had done, but he showed me a little way off the village of Monea, saying that the people of that place knew every house for a day's walk around. So I trudged to Monea, which is a village on one of the old dry islands of the marsh; but no one at Monea knew. There was, none the less, one old man who told me he had heard the name, and his advice to me was to go to the cross roads and past them towards March, and then to ask again. So I went outwards to the cross roads, and from the cross roads outward again it seemed without end, a similar land repeating itself for ever. There was the same silence, the same completely even soil, the same deep little trenches, the same rare distant and regular rows of trees. * * * * * Since it was useless to continue thus for you--one yard was as good as twenty miles--and since you could know nothing more of these silences, even if I were to give you every inch of the road, I will pass at once to the moment in which I saw a baker's cart catching me up at great speed. The man inside had an expression of irritable poverty. I did not promise him money, but gave it him. Then he took me aboard and rattled on, with me by his side. I had by this time a suspicion that the Griffin was a claustral thing and a mystery not to be blurted out. I knew that all the secrets of Hermes may be reached by careful and long-drawn words, and that the simplest of things will not be told one if one asks too precipitately; so I began to lay siege to his mind by the method of dialogue. The words were these:-- MYSELF: This land wanted draining, didn't it? THE OTHER MAN: Ah! MYSELF: It seems to be pretty well drained now. THE OTHER MAN: Ugh! MYSELF: I mean it seems dry enough. THE OTHER MAN: It was drownded only last winter. MYSELF: It looks to be good land. THE OTHER MAN: It's lousy land; it's worth nowt. MYSELF: Still, there are dark bits--black, you may say--and thereabouts it will be good. THE OTHER MAN: That's where you're wrong; the lighter it is the better it is ... ah! that's where many of 'em go wrong. (_Short silence_.) MYSELF: (_cheerfully_): A sort of loam? THE OTHER MAN (_calvinistically_): Ugh!--sand!... (_shaking his head_). It blaws away with a blast of wind. (_A longer silence_.) MYSELF (_as though full of interest_): Then you set your drills to sow deep about here? THE OTHER MAN (_with a gesture of fatigue_): Shoal. (_Here he sighed deeply_.) After this we ceased to speak to each other for several miles. Then: MYSELF: Who owns the land about here? THE OTHER MAN: Some owns parts and some others. MYSELF (_angrily pointing to an enormous field with a little new house in the middle_): Who owns that? THE OTHER MAN (_startled by my tone_): A Frenchman. He grows onions.