Lastly, the gods took away the fields and stream and left to the
prophet only his house and the larger things that were in it. Day by
day They crept about him drawing films of mist between him and familiar
things, till at last he beheld nought at all and was quite blind and
unaware of the anger of the gods. Then Ord's world became only a world
of sound, and only by hearing he kept his hold upon Things. All the
profit that he had out of his days was here some song from the hills or
there the voice of the birds, and sound of the stream, or the drip of
the falling rain. But the anger of the gods ceases not with the closing
of flowers, nor is it assuaged by all the winter's snows, nor doth it
rest in the full glare of summer, and They snatched away from Ord one
night his world of sound and he awoke deaf. But as a man may smite away
the hive of the bee, and the bee with all his fellows builds again,
knowing not what hath smitten his hive or that it shall smite again, so
Ord built for himself a world out of old memories and set it in the
past. There he builded himself cities out of former joys, and therein
built palaces of mighty things achieved, and with his memory as a key
he opened golden locks and had still a world to live in, though the
gods had taken from him the world of sound and all the world of sight.
But the gods tire not from pursuing, and They seized his world of
former things and took his memory away and covered up the paths that
led into the past, and left him blind and deaf and forgetful among men,
and caused all men to know that this was he who once had said that the
gods were little things.

And lastly the gods took his soul, and out of it They fashioned the
South Wind to roam the seas for ever and not have rest; and well the
South Wind knows that he hath once understood somewhere and long ago,
and so he moans to the islands and cries along southern shores, "I have
known," and "I have known."