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when the decreasing flow would have been obvious to all on the shore. I made a motion with my hands as though I were hastening it away.
    Then I turned back to the crowd and moved slowly towards them. The man with the rope had discovered his own reserve of bravery and now stood up to his ankles in the water.
    Disappointingly, the onlookers dispersed ahead of me. I had endured and ended their drama. My messenger led away the man with the banner, and I found my bag on the grass where the woman had been standing. Only the man who held the rope approached me and quizzed me on what I had seen, but he too seemed disappointed that there had not been some more dramatic conclusion to the morning’s events, and as I struggled out of my boots he told me atgreat length about the other pools on each of the chief rivers into which all flotsam, living and dead, was drawn, never to be seen again. Perhaps they had hoped for something similar of their own.

 
19
    My work today kept me out until after dark. Just as there are places in the far northern latitudes which remain light throughout the nights of high summer, so it seems to me that there are now days here when the covering of cloud from dawn to dusk gives the impression of night never having fully withdrawn.
    Winter, I am told, will come in a succession of testing, exploratory jabs, usually late in the days and during the hours of darkness, and at decreasing intervals. And following these jabs, almost as though the season were aware of the preparations being made in advance of its final approach, it will make its hard and unyielding thrust into the stone and the air of the place. There are weeks at theturn of the year when the temperature seldom rises above freezing, and when sheets and teeth of ice persist throughout.
    I have seen the moon shining as bright at three in the afternoon in a broken sky as at three in the morning when I have woken and looked out. My bedroom is bathed in its cold light, penetrating the curtains and casting its grid of small frames over my bed and the wall beside.
    I returned home earlier along the mine road and saw in the darkness how the pale stones set into its surface created a luminescence and gave it the appearance of a river flowing in the moonlight.
    Earlier still, while out surveying, I saw in the distance beyond the dam the trail of steam rising from a passing engine. The machine itself I neither saw nor heard – the wind was behind me – but its plume of white I saw clearly enough, unravelling above the woodlands and cuttings through which the track ran. It surprised me to see it so close – though in truth it was still eight miles off.
    I have packed torn rags into the door and loose window frames. Locally, the householders boil lumps of coal in their kettles and somehow manage to keep alight the gases rising from the spouts. I have experimented with producing my own gas, but with no success. There is always too much steam to kill the flame, and what little I do manage to boil off and keep alight fills the room with its stink rather than its glow.
    I have taken a cold after my exertions, and suffer from a headache and a nausea that my volatile does little to alleviate. I am loath to use my common remedy so soon. And, in truth, it is of course no remedy, merely a means ofalleviating the symptoms of an illness otherwise known as misery, touching at times on despair.
    Afterwards, I sat in my swaddle of blankets and looked at her likeness – it is all I possess of her now – until I found myself close to weeping. By which, of course, being a man, I mean that I wept.

20
 
    For the first time, my work took me into the abandoned quarry and stone-yard. Hewn and uncut slabs lay all around the workings, affording me some impression of the activity in the place on the day when someone, calculating that sufficient rock had been cut and shaped for the dam, blew his whistle and shouted to everyone working there that their labour and