without, and the ring of oaks curved up like a dark green vault. There
were nettles growing thick and rank in the foss; they looked different
from the common nettles in the lanes, and Lucian, letting his hand touch
a leaf by accident, felt the sting burn like fire. Beyond the ditch there
was an undergrowth, a dense thicket of trees, stunted and old, crooked
and withered by the winds into awkward and ugly forms; beech and oak and
hazel and ash and yew twisted and so shortened and deformed that each
seemed, like the nettle, of no common kind. He began to fight his way
through the ugly growth, stumbling and getting hard knocks from the
rebound of twisted boughs. His foot struck once or twice against
something harder than wood, and looking down he saw stones white with the
leprosy of age, but still showing the work of the axe. And farther, the
roots of the stunted trees gripped the foot-high relics of a wall; and a
round heap of fallen stones nourished rank, unknown herbs, that smelt
poisonous. The earth was black and unctuous, and bubbling under the feet,
left no track behind. From it, in the darkest places where the shadow was
thickest, swelled the growth of an abominable fungus, making the still
air sick with its corrupt odor, and he shuddered as he felt the horrible
thing pulped beneath his feet. Then there was a gleam of sunlight, and as
he thrust the last boughs apart, he stumbled into the open space in the
heart of the camp. It was a lawn of sweet close turf in the center of the
matted brake, of clean firm earth from which no shameful growth sprouted,
and near the middle of the glade was a stump of a felled yew-tree, left
untrimmed by the woodman. Lucian thought it must have been made for a
seat; a crooked bough through which a little sap still ran was a support
for the back, and he sat down and rested after his toil. It was not
really so comfortable a seat as one of the school forms, but the
satisfaction was to find anything at all that would serve for a chair. He
sat there, still panting after the climb and his struggle through the
dank and jungle-like thicket, and he felt as if he were growing hotter