Yes, he could feel temperature now. He was cold. There was sound, too, a distant whistling sound, like that of a wind in a chimney. The spots were fading into a general greyness. There was a sense of pressure, also, on the soles of his feet. He straightened his legs — yes, standing on something. But everything around him was grey — and bitter cold, with a wind whipping the skirts of his coat around him.

He looked down. His feet were there all right — «hello, feet, pleased to meet you.» But they were fixed in greyish-yellow mud which had squilched up in little ridges around them. The mud belonged to a track, only two feet wide, On both sides of it the grey-green of dying grass began. On the grass large flakes of snow were scattered, dandruffwise. More were coming, visible as dots of darker grey against the background of whirling mist, swooping down long parallel inclines, growing and striking the path with the tiniest ts. Now and then one spattered against Shea’s face.

He had done it. The formula worked!

TWO

«Welcome to Ireland!» Harold Shea murmured to himself. He thanked heaven that his syllogismobile had brought his clothes and equipment along with his person. It would never have done to have been dumped naked onto this freezing landscape. The snow was not atone responsible for the greyness. There was also a cold, clinging mist that cut off vision at a hundred yards or so. Ahead of him the track edged leftward around a little mammary of a hill, on whose flank a tree rocked under the melancholy wind. The tree’s arms all reached one direction, as though the wind were habitual; its branches bore a few leaves as grey and discouraged as the landscape itself. The tree was the only object visible in that wilderness of mud, grass and fog. Shea stepped towards it. The serrated leaves bore the indentations of the Northern scrub oak.