The heart of the Master

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Penumbra.

I am one of a concourse. All, or nigh all, seem fallen into heaviness, not from exhaustion of labour, but from lethargy. The plain is vast beyond eye to mark it's bounds, even were not all dark with blight of fog and thick with marish damp. A few of us are half awake, gaze dumbly on the East. No light responds.

Alas for me who am too much alive with the horrible and hopeless ache for sleep of one half-drugged! Dazed, stupified — I know not who I am — I know not whence I came — I know not whither I go. Vaguely I say within my dull heart: I must not sleep because I am a soldier. But of what captain, in what war? I cannot guess. There is but a dim shape as of some disaster long, oh! very long ago — the dusty memory of some leader who failed, some plan that broke its spine — I am sure of this: that all discipline is done, all courage quashed, all purpose perished.

Behind me — strange! — the gloom is less obscure than in the East to which the eyes yearn feebly. Do I feel it by instinct — the form of a vast pyramidal hill of stark black rock? I am too weary to turn my head to look.

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