Even as I write these words, which should be lucid and filled with glowing colour, I feel the very darkness of my own personality invading my pen. Only perhaps in the ink of this darkness can this writing properly be written? It is not really possible to write like an angel, though some of our near-gods by heaven-inspired trickery sometimes seem to do it.

It was dark now. A thin moon was visible, a bright portent, but giving no light.

What follows is ambiguous and sometimes tortuously told. Man's searchings and his strugglings are ambiguous and vowed to hidden ways. Those who live by that dark light will understand.

There is no light where I am. If any comes it is not enlightenment but lightning.

She thought, this is the end of happiness, darkness begins here.

The place was still there, present in the sunshine, instead of being hidden far away in darkness in the confines of some tragic opera.

Clement held her hand for a moment; knowing that after that moment the darkness would begin.

He thought, I haven't got much longer before some sort of collapse. He could not think if this would be a collapse of mind or of body. Mind and body seemed utterly fused now in cold aching pain, and darkness.

. . . darkness was staining all the intricate channels of what had once seemed so perfect.