and his guile. Now is it for me to strive for life against death."

Then he turned and went slowly up the stair, and came out on to the
open face of that Isle, and he saw that it was waste indeed, and
dreadful: a wilderness of black sand and stones and ice-borne rocks,
with here and there a little grass growing in the hollows, and here
and there a dreary mire where the white-tufted rushes shook in the
wind, and here and there stretches of moss blended with red-blossomed
sengreen; and otherwhere nought but the wind-bitten creeping willow
clinging to the black sand, with a white bleached stick and a leaf or
two, and again a stick and a leaf. In the offing looking landward
were great mountains, some very great and snow-capped, some bare to
the tops; and all that was far away, save the snow, was deep-blue in
the sunny morning. But about him on the heath were scattered rocks
like the reef beneath which he had slept the last night, and peaks,
and hammers, and knolls of uncouth shapes.

Then he went to the edge of the cliffs and looked down on the sea
which lay wrinkled and rippling on toward the shore far below him,
and long he gazed thereon and all about, but could see neither ship
nor sail, nor aught else save the washing of waves and the hovering
of sea fowl.

Then he said: "Were it not well if I were to seek that house-master
of whom Fox spake? Might he not flit me at least to the Land of the
Glittering Plain? Woe is me! now am I of that woful company, and I
also must needs cry out, Where is the land? Where is the land?"

Therewith he turned toward the reef above their lair, but as he went
he thought and said: "Nay, but was not this Stead a lie like the