He went obstinately forward, crossing field after field in the falling darkness, forcing his way recklessly through every sort of rank vegetation, through every sort of arable fallowness. He had left the school-treat field for more than an hour now. He had crossed, almost without consciousness of doing so, the main road between Ramsgard and Blacksod. He had threaded his way through the maze of small, grassy lanes that lay between that highway and the village of Gwent. And now, emerging in the scented autumn night into a rondure of sloping hills, he could see, beyond the scattered lights of Gwent, a vast unbounded region, shadow within shadow, vapour within vapour, a region that he knew to be⁠—though all he could actually see was darkness of a thicker, richer quality than the darkness about him⁠—the umbrageous threshold of Somerset, the first leafy estuary of that ocean of greenness out of which rose, like the phallus of an unknown god, the mystical hill of Glastonbury!