Yet in the Time of the Locust are we not counselled to patience? Eighty years have passed since tegeus-Cromis broke the yoke of Canna Moidart, since the Chemosit fell and the Reborn Men came among us; and in the deeps of this autumn night, under the aegis of an old and bitter geology, we witness here in events astronomical and enigmatic an intersection crucial to both the Earth and the precarious foothold on it of the adolescent Evening Cultures. 'Wait! Things are. Things happen. Only wait!'The estuarine cliffs impend, black, expectant; the air is full of frost and anticipation…

It is the hour of our old enemy, the Moon. Her fugitive reflections shiver on the water amid the cold unmeaning patterns of the wind. Above, her tense circle aches across the sky (imprisoned there within it, staring down, the pocked face of our mysterious crone, our companion of a million-million years). Somewhere between midnight and dawn, in that hour when sick men topple from the high ledges of themselves and fall into the darkness; suddenly and with no warning; something can be seen to detach itself from the edge of that charmed circle and, through the terrible spaces surrounding, speed towards the Earth. It is only a tiny puff of vapour, a cloud of pollen blown across a single ray of light in some darkened, empty room – gone in the time it takes to blink, to rub the eyes and rearrange the waiting brain: but nothing like this has been seen for ten thousand years; and though all might seem unchanged, and the Moon hang never so white and hard over the rim of the cliffs, like a powdered face yearning from a vacant doorway, and the memory decide the eye has played it false – nothing will ever be the same again.

Not many hours later, as the thin, uncertain light of day spreads like smoke between the soft fat stems, limning the fallen column of the tower, a figure emerges from the hemlock thickets – puzzled and reluctant as if harried from a deep sleep – to scan the southern sky where the Moon is still a bone-white image, the cankered face which lingers in a dream.