Nightshade and Damnations

VOICES IN THE DUST OF ANNAN

I landed on the northeast coast, with tinned goods and other trade goods such as steel knives, beads, and sweet chocolate, intending to make my way to the ruins of Annan.

A chieftain of the savages of the Central Belt warned me not to go to The Bad Place. That was his name for the ancient ruins of the forgotten city of Annan, a hundred miles to the southeast. Some of the tribesmen called it The Dead Place, or The Dark Place. He called it The Bad Place. He was a grim, but honorable old ruffian, squat and hairy and covered with scars. Over a pot of evil-smelling black beer—they brew it twice a year, with solemn ceremony, and everyone gets hideously drunk—he grew communicative, and, as the liquor took hold of him, boastful. He showed me his tattooing: every mark meant something, so that his history was pricked out on his skin. When a chieftain of the Central Belt dies he is flayed, and his hide is hung up in the hut that is reserved for holy objects: so he lives in human memory. Showing his broken teeth in a snarling smile, he pointed to a skillfully executed fish on his left arm: it proved that he had won a great victory over the Fish-Eaters of the north. A wild pig on his chest celebrated the massacre of the Pig Men of the northwest. He hiccuped a bloody story, caressing a black-and-red dog that lay at his feet and watched me with murderous yellow eyes. . . . Oh, the distances he had travelled, the men he had killed, the women he had ravished, the riches he had plundered! He knew everything. He liked me—had I not given him a fine steel knife? So he would give me some good advice.

“I could keep you here if I liked,” he said, “but you are my friend, and if you want to go you may go. I will even send ten armed men with you. You may need them. If you are traveling southwards you must pass through the country of the Red Men. They eat men when they can catch them, and move fast: they come and go. Have no fear, however, of the Bird Men. For a handful of beads and a little wire—especially wire—they will do anything. My men will not go with you to The Bad Place. Nobody ever goes to The Bad Place. Even I would not go to The Bad Place, and I am the bravest man in the world. Why must you go? Stay. Live under my protection. I will give you a wife. Look. You can have her—” He jerked a spatulate thumb in the direction of a big, swarthy girl with greased hair who squatted, almost naked, a couple of yards away. “—She is one of mine. But you can have her. No man has touched her yet. Marry her. Stay.”

I said: “Tell me, why have you—even you, Chief—stayed away from that place?”

He grew grave. “I fear no man and no beast,” he said.

“But—?”

“But.” He gulped some more black beer. “There are things.”

“What things?”

“Things. Little people.” He meant fairies. “I’ll fight anything I can see. But what of that which man cannot see? Who fights that? Stay away from The Bad Place. Marry her . . . Stay here. Feel her—fat! Don’t go. Nobody goes. . . . Hup! I like you. You are my friend. You must stay here.”

I gave him a can of peaches. He crowed like a baby. “You are my friend,” he said, “and if you want to go, then go. But if you get away, come back.”

“If?” I said.

“If.”

“I don’t believe in fairies,” I said.

His eyebrows knotted, his fists knotted, and he bared his teeth. “Are you saying that what I say is not true?” he shouted.

“King, Great Chief,” I said, “I believe, I believe. What you say is true.”

“If I had not given my word I should have had you killed for that,” he grunted. “But I have gi-given my word. . . . Hup! My-my word is a word. I . . . you . . . go, go!”

Next morning he was ill. I gave him magnesia in a pot of water, for which he expressed gratitude. That day I set out with ten squat, sullen warriors; killers, men without fear.

But when we came in sight of the place that was called The Bad Place, The Dark Place, or The Dead Place, they stopped. For no consideration would they walk another step forward. I offered each man a steel knife. Their terror was stronger than their desire. “Not even for that,” said their leader.

I went on alone.

It was a dead place because there was no life in it; and therefore it was also a dark place. No grass grew there. It had come to nothingness. Not even the coarse, hardy weeds that find a root-hold in the uncooled ashes of burnt-out buildings pushed their leaves out of its desolation. Under the seasonal rain it must have been a quagmire. Now, baked by the August sun, it was a sort of ash-heap, studded with gray excrescences that resembled enormous cinders. A dreary, dark gray, powdery valley went down; a melancholy dust-heap of a hill crept up and away. As I looked I saw something writhe and come up out of the hillside—it came down toward me with a sickening, wriggling run, and it was pale gray like a ghost. I drew my pistol. Then the gray thing pirouetted and danced. It was nothing but dust, picked up by a current of warm air. The cold hand that had got hold of my heart relaxed, and my heart fell back into my stomach, where it had already sunk.

I went down. This place was so dead that I was grateful for the company of the flies that had followed me. The sun struck like a floodlight out of a clean blue sky; every crumb of grit threw a clear-cut black shadow in the dust. A bird passed, down and up, quick as the flick of a whip, on the trail of a desperate dragonfly. Yet here, in a white-hot summer afternoon, I felt that I was going down, step by step, into the black night of the soul. This was a bad place.

The dust clung to me. I moved slowly, between half-buried slabs of shattered granite. Evening was coming. A breeze that felt like a hot breath on my neck stirred the ruins of the ancient city; dust devils twisted and flirted and fell; the sun gray-red. At last I found something that had been a wall, and pitched my tent close to it. Somehow it was good to have a wall behind me. There was nothing to be afraid of—there was absolutely nothing. Yet I was afraid. What is it that makes a comfortable man go out with a pickaxe to poke among the ruins of ancient cities? I was sick with nameless terror. But fear breeds pride. I could not go back. And I was tired, desperately tired. If I did not sleep I would break.

I ate and lay down. Sleep was picking me away, leaf by leaf. Bad place . . . dead place . . . dark place . . . little people. . . .

Before I fell asleep I thought I heard somebody singing a queer, wailing song:—Oh-oooo, oh-oooo, oh-oooo! It rose and descended—it conveyed terror. It might have been an owl, or some other night-bird; or it might have been the wind in the ruins; or a half-dream. It sounded almost human, though. I started awake, clutching my pistol. I could have sworn that the wail was forming words. What words? They sounded like some debased sort of Arabic:—

Ookil’ karabin

Ookil’ karabin

Isapara mibanara

Ikil’ karabin

Ookil’ karabin

As I sat up the noise stopped. Yes, I thought, I was dreaming; I lay back and went to sleep. Centuries of silence lay in the dust.

All the same, in that abominable loneliness I felt that I was not alone. I awoke five times before dawn, to listen. There was nothing. Even the flies had gone away. Yet when day broke I observed that something strange had happened.

My socks had disappeared.

In the dust, that powdery dust in which the petal of a flower would have left its imprint, there were no tracks. Yet the flap of my tent was unfastened, and my socks were gone.

For the next three days I sifted the detritus of that dead city, fumbling and feeling after crumbs of evidence, and listening to the silence. My pickaxe pecked out nothing but chips of stone and strange echoes. On the second day I unearthed some fragments of crumbling glass and shards of white, glazed pottery, together with a handful of narrow pieces of iron which fell to nothing as I touched them. I also found a small dish of patterned porcelain, inscribed with five letters—R E S E N—part of some inscription. It was sad and strange that this poor thing should have survived the smashing of the huge edifices and noble monuments of that great city. But all the time, I felt that someone, or something, was watching me an inch beyond my field of vision. On the third day I found a red drinking-vessel, intact, and a cooking-pot of some light, white metal, with marks of burning on the bottom of it and some charred powder inside. The housewife to whom this pot belonged was cooking some sort of stew, no doubt, when the wrath of God struck the city.

When the blow fell, that city must have ceased to be in less time than it takes to clap your hands: it fell like the cities of the plain when the fire came down from heaven. Here, as in the ruins of Pompeii, one might discover curiously pathetic ashes and highly individual dust. I found the calcined skeleton of a woman, clutching, in the charred vestiges of loving arms, the skeletal outline of a newly-born child. As I touched these remains they broke like burnt paper. Not far away, half-buried in a sort of volcanic cinder, four twisted lumps of animal charcoal lay in the form of a cross, the center of which was a shapeless mass of glass: this had been a sociable drinking-party. This lump of glass melted and ran into a blob, the outlines of which suggest the map of Africa. But in the equatorial part of it so to speak one could distinguish the base of a bottle. I also found a tiny square of thin, woven stuff. It must have been a handkerchief, a woman’s handkerchief. Some whimsy of chance let it stay intact. In one corner of it was embroidered a Roman letter A. Who was A? I seem to see some fussy, fastidious gentlewoman, discreetly perfumed—a benevolent tyrant at home, but every inch a lady. Deploring the decadence of the age, she dabbed this delicate twenty-five square inches of gauzy nothingness at one sensitive nostril. Then—psst! She and the house in which she lived were swept away in one lick of frightful heat. And the handkerchief fluttered down on her ashes.

Nearby, untouched by time and disaster, stood a low wall of clay bricks. On this wall was an inscription in chalk. A child must have scrawled it. It said: Lidia is a dirty pig. Below it lay the unidentifiable remains of three human beings. As I looked, the air-currents stirred the dust. Swaying and undulating like a ballet dancer, a fine gray powdery corkscrew spun up and threw itself at my feet.

That night, again, I thought I heard singing. But what was there to sing? Birds? There were no birds. Nevertheless, I lay awake. I was uneasy. There was no moon. I saw that my watch said 12:45. After that I must have slipped into the shallow end of sleep, because I opened my eyes—instinct warned me to keep still—and saw that more than two hours had passed. I felt rather than heard a little furtive sound. I lay quiet and listened. Fear and watchfulness had sharpened my ears. In spite of the beating of my heart I heard a tink-tink of metal against metal. My flashlight was under my left hand; my pistol was in my right. I breathed deeply. The metal clinked again. Now I knew where to look. I aimed the flashlight at the noise, switched on a broad beam of bright light, and leapt up with a roar of that mad rage that comes out of fear. Something was caught in the light. The light paralyzed it: the thing was glued in the shining, white puddle—it had enormous eyes. I fired at it—I mean, I aimed at it and pressed my trigger, but had forgotten to lift my safety-catch. Holding the thing in the flashlight beam, I struck at it with the barrel of the pistol. I was cruel because I was afraid. It squealed, and something cracked. Then I had it by the neck. If it was not a rat it smelled like a rat. Oh-oooo, oh-oooo, oh-oooo! it wailed, and I heard something scuffle outside. Another voice wailed oh-oooo, oh-oooo, oh-oooo! A third voice picked it up. In five seconds, the hot, dark night was full of a most woebegone crying. Five seconds later there was silence, except for the gasping of the cold little creature under my hand.

I was calm now, and I saw that it was not a rat. It was something like a man; a little, distorted man. The light hurt it, yet it could not look away—the big eyes contracted, twitching and flickering, out of a narrow and repulsive face fringed with a pale hair.

“O, O, O,” it said—the wet, chisel-toothed mouth was quivering on the edge of a word.

I noticed then that it was standing on something gray—looked again, and saw my woolen jacket. It had been trying to take this jacket away. But in the right-hand pocket there were a coin and a small key: they had struck together and awakened me.

I was no longer afraid so I became kind. “Calm,” I said, as one talks to a dog, “Calm, calm, calm! Quiet now, quiet!”

The little white one held up a wrist from which drooped a skinny, naked hand like a mole’s paw, and whispered:

“Oh-oooo.”

“Sit!” I said.

It was terrified and in pain. I had broken its wrist: I should say his wrist—he was a sort of man; a male creature; wretched, filthy and dank, dwarfish, debased; greenish-white like mildew, smelling like mildew, cold and wetly-yielding like mildew; rat-toothed, rat-eared and chinless; yet not unlike a man. If he had stood upright he would have been about three feet tall.

This, then, was the nameless thing that had struck such terror into the bloody old chieftain of the savages of the Central Belt—this bloodless, chinless thing without a forehead, whose limbs were like the tendrils of a creeping plant that sprouts in the dark, and who cringed, twittering and whimpering, at my feet. Its eyes were large like a lemur’s. The ears were long, pointed, and almost transparent; they shone sickly-pink in the light, and I could see that they were reticulated with thin, dark veins. There had been some attempt at clothing—a kind of primitive jacket and leggings of some thin gray fur, tattered and indescribably filthy. My stomach turned at the feel of it, and its deathly, musty smell.

This, then, was one of the fairies, one of the little people of The Dead Place, and I had it by the neck.

I may say, at this point, that I have always believed in fairies. By “fairies” I do not mean little, delicate, magical, pretty creatures with butterfly wings, living among the flowers and drinking nectar out of bluebell blossoms. I do not believe in such fairies. But I do believe in the little people—the gnomes, elves, pucks, brownies, pixies, and leprechauns of legend. Belief in these little people is as old as the world, universal, and persistent. In the stories, you remember, the outward appearance of the little people is fairly constant. They are dwarfish. They have big eyes and long, pointed features. They come out at night, and have the power to make themselves invisible. Sometimes they are mischievous. They have been known to steal babies from their cradles. The horrified mother, starting awake, finds, in the place of her plump, rosy infant, a shriveled little horror. The little people have carried her baby away and left one of their own in its place—a changeling as it is called. It is best to keep on the good side of the little people, because they can play all kinds of malevolent tricks—spoil the butter, frighten the cows, destroy small objects. You will have observed that they have no power to seriously injure mankind; yet they carry with them the terror of the night. In some parts of the world, peasants placate the little people by leaving out a bowl of hot porridge or milk for them to drink, for they are always hungry and always cold. Note that. Every child has read the story of the cold lad of the hill: A poor cobbler, having spent his last few coins on a piece of leather, fell asleep, too tired to work. When he awoke in the morning he found that the leather had been worked with consummate skill into a beautiful pair of slippers. He sold these slippers and bought a larger piece of leather, which he left on the bench together with a bowl of hot soup. Then he pretended to fall asleep and saw, out of the corner of his eye, a tiny, pale, shivering, naked man who crept in and set to work with dazzling speed. Next morning there were two pairs of slippers. This went on for several days. Prosperity returned to the house of the cobbler. His wife, to reward the little man, knitted him a little cloak with a hood. They put the garment on the bench. That night the little man came again. He saw the cloak and hood, put them on, with a squeal of joy, capered up and down the cobbler’s bench admiring himself, and at last sprang out of the window saying, “I have taken your cloak, I have taken your hood, and the cold lad of the hill will do no more good.” He never appeared again. He had got what he wanted: a woolen cloak with a hood.

The little people hate the cold, it appears.

Now if they are sensitive to cold and hunger, as all the stories indicate, they must be people of flesh and blood. Why not? There are all kinds of people. There is no reason why, in the remote past, certain people should not have gone to live underground, out of the reach of fierce and powerful enemies. For example, there used to be a race of little men in north Britain called the Picts. History records them as fierce and cunning little border raiders—men of the heather, who harried the Roman garrisons in ancient times and stole whatever they could lay their hands on. These Picts—like the African bushmen who, by the way, were also very little people—could move so quickly and surely that they seemed to have a miraculous gift of invisibility. In broad daylight a Pict could disappear, and not a single heather-blossom quivered over his hiding place. The Picts disappeared off the face of the earth at last. Yet, for centuries, in certain parts of Scotland, the farmers and shepherds continued to fear them. They were supposed to have gone underground, into the caves, from whence they sometimes emerged to carry off a sheep, a woman, a cooking-pot or a child.

Superstition turned these small, terrified creatures into fairies. In Cornwall again, many people used to believe in piskies—little creatures with big eyes, who wrapped themselves up in garments with pointed hoods and whom it was wise to placate with bowls of milk. It seems to me not unreasonable to assume that, during the long, drawn out periods of strife on the western borders of Britain, certain little weak people went underground, and made a new life for themselves secure in the darkness of the caves. Living in the dark, of course, they would grow pale. After many generations they would have developed a cat’s faculty for seeing in the dark. And for feeling their way they would have developed a bushman’s knack of disappearing—of keeping absolutely still in cover. But they were human beings and could not entirely divorce themselves from their fellows; so they stayed—half-yearning, and half-terrified—not far from ordinary human habitation. The little people are supposed to know the whereabouts of great buried treasures. This also is possible. Their remote ancestors may have taken their riches with them to bury, meaning to unearth them in safer times which never came. Again, these strange underground men, who knew every stone, every tree, and every tuft of grass in their country, may easily have come across treasures buried by other men. They would have retained the human instinct to pick up and carry away something bright or valuable, and so they carried everything that they found to the mysterious places below the surface of the earth where they lived their mysterious lives; and since they had no real use for the money they had acquired, they let it accumulate. In how many fairy tales has one read of the well-disposed little one who left behind him a bright gold coin.

I am convinced that ever since frightened men began to run away and hide, there have been little people, in other words, fairies. And such was the drooling, nightmarish little thing that trembled in my grip that night in the tent.

I remembered, then, how frightened I had been. As I thought of all the awe that such creatures had inspired through the ages, I began to laugh. The little man—I had better call him a man—listened to me. He stopped whimpering. His ears quivered, then he gave out a queer, breathless, hiccuping sound, faint as the ticking of a clock. “Are you human?” I asked.

He trembled, and laboriously made two noises: “Oon-ern.”

He was trying to repeat what I had said. I led him to an angle of the tent so that he could not escape, and tied up his wrist with an elastic plaster. He looked at it, gibbering. Then I gave him a piece of highly-sweetened chocolate. He was afraid of that too. I bit off a corner and chewed it, saying, “Good. Eat.”

I was absurdly confident that, somehow, he would understand me. He tried to say what I had said—Oo-ee, and crammed the chocolate into his mouth. For half a second he slobbered, twitching with delight, then the chocolate was gone. I patted his head. The touch of it made me shudder, yet I forced my hand to a caress. I was the first man on earth who had ever captured a fairy: I would have taken him to my bosom. I smiled at him. He blinked at me. I could see by the movement of his famished little chest that he was a little less afraid of me. I found another piece of chocolate and offered it to him. But in doing so, I lowered my flashlight. The chocolate was flicked out of my hand. I was aware of something that bobbed away and ran between my legs. Before I could turn, the little man was gone. The flap of the tent was moving. If it had not been for that, and a stale, dirty smell, I might have thought I had been dreaming.

I turned the beam of my flashlight to the ground.

This time, the little man had left tracks.

As I was to discover, the little people of The Dead Place used to cover their tracks by running backwards on all fours and blowing dust over the marks their hands and feet had made. But my little man had not had time to do this tonight.

Dawn was beginning to break. I filled my pockets with food and set out. Nothing was too light to leave a mark in that place, but the same quality that made the fine dust receptive made every mark impermanent. I began to run. The little man’s tracks resembled those of a gigantic mole. The red dust sun was up and the heat of the day was coming down, when I came to the end of his trail. He had scuttled under a great, gray heap of shattered stone. This had been a vast—possibly a noble—building. Now it was a rubbish heap; packed tight by the inexorable pull of the earth through the centuries. Here was fairyland, somewhere in the depths of the earth.

Enormous edifices had been crushed and scattered like burnt biscuits thrown to the wild birds. The crumbs were identifiable. The shape of the whole was utterly lost. The loneliness was awful. Inch by inch I felt myself slipping into that spiritual twilight which sucks down to the black night of the soul. The tracks of the little man had disappeared—the dust was always drifting, and the contours of the lost city were perpetually changing. Yesterday was a memory. Tomorrow was a dream. Then tomorrow became yesterday—a memory; and memory blurred and twirled away with the dust devils. I was sick. There was a bad air in the ruins of Annan. I might have died, or run away, if there had not been the thunderstorm.

It threatened for forty-eight hours. I thought that I was delirious. Everything was still, dreadfully still. The air was thick, and hard to breathe. It seemed to me that from some indefinable part of the near distance I heard again that thin, agonized singing which I had heard once before. Male and female voices wailed a sort of hymn:—

Aaah, Balasamo,

Balasamo! Oh!

Sarna Corpano! . . . Oh-Oh!

Binno Mosha

Sada Rosha

Chu mila Balasamo! . . . Oh!

Then the storm broke, and I thanked God for it. It cleared the air and it cleared my head. The sky seemed to shake and reverberate like a sheet of iron. Lightning feinted and struck, and the rain fell. Between the thunder I could still hear the singing. As dawn came the storm rumbled away, and the aspect of the ruins was changed.

Annan wore a ragged veil of mist. Thin mud was running away between the broken stones. The sun was coming up and in a little while the dust would return; but for the moment the rain had washed the face of the ruin.

So I found the lid of the underworld.

It was a disc of eroded metal that fitted a hole in the ground. I struck it with my hammer: it fell to pieces. The pieces dropped away, and out of the hole in the ground there rose a dusty, sickening, yet familiar smell. The hole was the mouth of an ancient sewer. I could see the rusty remains of a metal ladder. The top rung was solid—I tried it with my foot. The next rung supported my weight. I went down.

The fifth rung broke, and I fell.

I remember that I saw a great white light—then a great dark. Later—I do not know how much later—I opened my eyes. I knew that I was alive, because I felt pain. But I was not lying where I had fallen. I could see no circle of daylight such as I had seen in falling, at the mouth of the manhole. There was nothing to be seen: I was in the dark. And I could hear odd little glottal voices.

“Water!” I said.

“Ah-awa,” said a thin, whining voice. Something that felt like a cracked earthenware saucer was pressed against my lips. It contained a spoonful or two of cold water; half a mouthful. The cracked earthenware saucer was taken away empty and brought back full. I took hold of it, to steady it.

It was a little cupped hand, a live hand.

I knew then that I had fallen down into the underground world of the little people that haunt the desolate ruin called Annan, or The Bad Place. I was in fairyland. But my right leg was broken. My flashlight was broken, and I was in the dark.

There was nothing to be done. I could only lie still.

The little people squatted around me in a circle. One high, ecstatic, piping voice began to sing:

Ookil’ karabin,

Ookil’ karabin!

Thirty or forty voices screeched:—

Isapara mibanara,

Ikil’ karabin!

Then, abruptly, the singing stopped. Something was coming. These little people knew the art of making fire, and understood the use of light. One of them was holding a tiny vessel, in which flickered a dim, spluttering flame no larger than a baby’s fingernail. It was not what we would call illumination. It was better than darkness, it permitted one to see, at least, a shadow. You will never know the comfort that I found in that tiny flame. I wept for joy. My sobbing jolted my broken leg, and I must have fainted. I was a wounded man, remember. Shivering in a wet cold that came from me and not from the place in which I lay, I felt myself rising in waves of nausea out of a horrible emptiness.

The little people had gone, all but one. The one that stayed had my elastic plaster on his left wrist. His right hand was cupped, and it held water, which I drank. Then he made a vague gesture in the direction of my pockets—he wanted chocolate. I saw this in the light of the little lamp, which still flickered. His shadow danced; he looked like a rat waltzing with a ghost. I had some chocolate in my pocket, and gave him a little. The light was dying. I pointed at it with a forefinger and gesticulated up, up, up with my hands.

He ran away and came back with another lamp.

I can tell you now that the oil that feeds those little lamps is animal fat—the fat of rats. The wicks of the lamps are made of twisted rat-hair. The little men of Annan have cultivated rats, since they went underground. There are hereditary rat-herds, just as there used to be hereditary shepherds and swine-herds. I have learned something—not much—of the habits of the little men of the dust in Annan. They dress in rat-skin clothes and have scraped out runs, or burrows, which extend for miles to the thirty-two points of the compass. They have no government and no leaders. They are sickly people. They are perishing.

Yet they are men of a sort. They have fire, although they cannot tolerate the glare of honest daylight. They have—like all of their kind—a buried treasure of useless coins. They have the vestiges of a language, but they are always cold. The poor creature whose wrist I broke had wanted my woolen jacket; now I gave it to him, and he wept for joy. They cultivated fungi—which I have eaten, not without relish—augment their diet of the rank meat which they get by butchering the gray creatures that provide them with food, fat, and fur. But they are always hungry. The rats are getting slower and less reliable in their breeding: the herds are thinning out.

My little man kept me supplied with meat and water. In the end I began to understand the meaning of his whispering and snuffling underworld language. This fairy, this man of the dust of Annan, was kind to me in his way. He adored me as a fallen god. Sometimes, when I raved and wept in delirium, he ran away. But he always came back. My leg was throbbing. I knew that infection was taking hold of the wound, and began to lose hope down in the dark. I tried to detach my mind from the miserable condition of my body. I listened to the strange songs of the rat-people. It was through the chant Balasamo that I learned their language. It came to me in a flash of revelation as I lay listening, Balasamo, Balasamo . . . The tune wove in and out. It gave me no peace. I had heard something like it at home. Doctor Opel had been lecturing on ancient music. . . .

Suddenly I understood. I remembered.

Balasamo,

Balasamo,

Sarnacorpano!

This was a song five hundred years old. It used to be a marching song during World Wars I, II and III. The words, which time had corrupted and misery debased, should have been:

Bless ’em all,

Bless ’em all,

Sergeants and Corporals and all!

There’ll be no promotion

This side of the ocean

So cheer up my lads, bless ’em all!

Similarly, Ookil’ karabin meant Who Killed Cock Robin.

And, of course, Annan came down, whine by whine, through Unnon and Lunnon from London! The little people spoke archaic English. I could see, then, something of their melancholy history. I could see the proud city dwellers going down to become shelter dwellers at the outbreak of the Atom War, The Ten Minute War of 19 . . . , 19 . . . . I forget the exact date . . . My head is swimming . . . My little rat-man watches me with terrified eyes. Somewhere his people are singing . . . But the light is dying, and so am I. . . .