Suddenly the white air was full of the screaming of birds . . . a shrill, high, sound that took her back into her childhood. Once, with her father, she had been taken to Swansea on a business trip and had heard gulls calling on the Gower Cliffs. She felt that she must be dreaming. Even on a night of storm no gulls could be blown so far inland as this, and yet she was sure that her childish memory could not have failed. The cries that she heard now were the cries of gulls wheeling and screaming in the mist above her head. Abner turned and called her. ‘Did you ever hear the like of it?’ he called. ‘I never heard such a chronic row!’ ‘They’re gulls,’ she shouted. Her voice was thin in the mist. ‘Seagulls.’ ‘That’s where they must have come from. Off of this water,’ he called. And she saw, peering in front of her, a ghostly wood of pines and before them a lake of dark water fringed with reeds. The wind swept across it, bending the reeds, breaking the glassy surface into ripples, and rolling milky mist before it. The wind came in gusts, roaring through the trees with a noise that was like that of the sea, and the gulls screamed above them, unseen, as they might have screamed over storm-bound cliffs. She stood with her knees trembling at Abner’s side, and Morgan clutched her hand. She herself felt like a child, lonely, frightened. They stood so quietly together that some of the birds swooped down on to the water as though driven by the wind. ‘Yes, they’re gulls,’ she said. ‘Seagulls. We’re more than fifty miles away from the sea. I don’t understand.’ She laughed nervously. It came to her suddenly that she could go no farther. Her legs could not make a single step. The gulls came dropping down in twos and threes, and settled on the lake. They were smaller than those that she remembered, she thought. They dropped down just like pigeons when you scatter grain. ‘Come on,’ said Abner. ‘It’s near dark.’ But she could not move. The child tugged at her skirt. She felt the tugging in a dream.