Once the Red Mill had been a pumping station, which, when the huge sails worked, delivered the water from the fertile meadows into the great dyke, whence it ran through sluice gates to the North Sea. Now, although the embankment of this dyke still held, the meadows had gone back into swamps. Rising out of these—for it was situated upon a low mound of earth, raised, doubtless, as a point of refuge by marsh-dwellers who lived and died before history began, towered the wreck of a narrow-waisted windmill, built of brick below and wood above, of very lonesome and commanding appearance in its gaunt solitude. There were no houses near it, no cattle grazed about its foot; it was a dead thing in a dead landscape. To the left, but separated from it by a wide and slimy dyke, whence in times of flood the thick, brackish water trickled to the plain, stretched an arid area of sand-dunes, clothed with sparse grass, that grew like bristles upon the back of a wild hog. Beyond these dunes the ocean roared and moaned and whispered hungrily as the wind and weather stirred its depths. In front, not fifty paces away, ran the big dyke like a raised road, secured by embankments, and discharging day by day its millions of gallons of water into the sea. But these embankments were weakening now, and here and there could be seen a spot which looked as though a giant ploughshare had been drawn up them, for a groove of brown earth scarred the face of green, where in some winter flood the water had poured over to find its level, cutting them like cheese, but when its volume sank, leaving them still standing, and as yet sufficient for their purpose. To the right again and behind, were more marshes, broken only in the distance by the towers of Haarlem and the spires of village churches, marshes where the snipe and bittern boomed, the herons fed, and in summer the frogs croaked all night long. Such was the refuge to which Ramiro and his son, Adrian, had been led by Hague Simon and Black Meg, after they had escaped with their lives from Leyden upon the night of the image-breaking in the church, that ominous night when the Abbe Dominic gave up the ghost on the arm of the lofty Rood, and Adrian had received absolution and baptism from his consecrated hand. On the journey hither Adrian asked no questions as to their destination; he was too broken in heart and too shaken in body to be curious; life in those days was for him too much of a hideous phantasmagoria of waste and blackness out of which appeared vengeful, red-handed figures, out of which echoed dismal, despairing voices calling him to doom.