Yes, but would that end it? The material envelope of cells and fluids gone, might there not ...? Christ! Worse off yet, if anything were left.... There might be something left; there was the trouble.... One knew so little, so abominably little.... Only material wisdom was certain, and that said: Don't chance it.... Drink? He had his men to think of, his ship.... It might grip him. But was he forever doomed to this mournful weeping place, place of rain, place of mists, gray boulders, and moaning winds? Must he abide in the Valley of the Black Pig until the Boar without Bristles came lumbering out of the red west, and went grunting, eating ravenously, eating prey of souls, until he lay down in obscene sleep, and the stars one by one guttered like candles, and the sun shot into a vast explosion, and the moon was a handful of peat ashes, and the whole great universe snapped like a gunshot and the debris of all created things fell downward like a shattered wall, faster, faster, faster, to where, where, where? Section 7 In the streets now the June snow fell, not the soft and flaky petals of the North, but a bitter steel-like snow, that whirled. And the winds of the pampas hurried like Furies through the sordid streets, and stopped to snarl, as a dog snarls, and now moaned, and now howled sharply, as a wolf howls. There was something cold, malignant, about it all ... Old Irish writers said that hell was cold. _An Ait Fuar_, they called it, the Cold Place. _Ait gan chu gan chat, gan leanbh, ait gan ghean, gan ghaire_, a place without a dog, or cat, or child, a place without affection or laughter.... Had sainted Brendan come on Buenos Aires in winter on his voyage to Hy Brazil, and thought in his naivete that here was hell ...? And was he wrong?