All through the spring and summer the hedges had been gay with flowers in wedding colours, but now they were covered with the black-seeded booryan plant (something like dwarf elder when in flower). Here and there the yellow rag-wort alternated with the booryan, in a passing scheme of black and yellow, or the delicate blue chicory flower made a brave show on the roadside; but the main impression now was blackness: the hedges were already in mourning for the sights they soon would witness. We lunched under some trees, three-quarters of an hour from Rudnik, and arrived at noon. The long grass in the school enclosure had been cut as promised--Serbian officials never fail to carry out their promises--and by 6 p.m. the camp was established. The Prefect welcomed us on arrival, and placed everything we could want at our disposal. This unit was especially fortunate in its surroundings, their tent doors opened to a georama of mountains and valleys which seemed to stretch to Infinity and to include all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them. Mountains did not hide mountains, for we were on the heights, 2,000 feet above sea-level. Ruins of an old fort on the kopje of Ostavitza, a few kilometres distant, a reminiscence of Turkish history, gave the only touch of human reality. The sunset that evening ignored its usual levantine limitations, and ran riot in flaming colours of red, and gold, and nameless greens, all over the heavens: a chord of Nature in the major key; and in antiphon, the mountains gave response, in colours reflected from heaven and earth and all that in them is. Later, when work for the day was finished, and I lay on my camp bed--the tent doors open--gazing into the black curtain of night, trying to see things that were invisible, the moon came sailing through the sky, tacking in and out of banks of storm clouds. Her wireless was as usual in minor mode. "Joy and colour are ephemeral," was her code message. "Beauty is death, and death is shade and sorrow. The shade of a long night draws near. The dews of death are in the air." I was going to dispute with her, but she abruptly hid behind a thunder-cloud. An owl in a beech tree hooted; a gust of wind sent a shiver through the plum trees, and I remembered the stirring in the mulberry trees--the warning to David of the coming enemy; a rumbling, like a cannonade, echoed through the mountains; a clap like the bursting of a thousand bombs boomed overhead--Thor's guns, more merciful than man's--then immediately came a fall of rain, fierce, precipitous, as though the dams of heaven had burst; lightning, like a fiery sword, striking an unseen enemy; then a hush, as sudden as the onslaught, and a quiet night.