night near palaces of beautiful design or beside gardens of flowers,
hoping to find their enemy when he came to desecrate in the dark.
Sometimes they came on cobwebs, sometimes on rusted chains and houses
with broken roofs or crumbling walls. Then the armies would push on
apace thinking that they were closer upon the track of Time.

As the weeks passed by and weeks grew to months, and always they heard
reports and rumours of Time, but never found him, the armies grew weary
of the great march, but the King pushed on and would let none turn
back, saying always that the enemy was near at hand.

Month in, month out, the King led on his now unwilling armies, till at
last they had marched for close upon a year and came to the village of
Astarma very far to the north. There many of the King's weary soldiers
deserted from his armies and settled down in Astarma and married
Astarmian girls. By these soldiers we have the march of the armies
clearly chronicled to the time when they came to Astarma, having been
nigh a year upon the march. And the army left that village and the
children cheered them as they went up the street, and five miles
distant they passed over a ridge of hills and out of sight. Beyond this
less is known, but the rest of this chronicle is gathered from the
tales that the veterans of the King's armies used to tell in the
evenings about the fires in Zoon and remembered afterwards by the men
of Zeenar.

It is mostly credited in these days that such of the King's armies as
went on past Astarma came at last (it is not known after how long a
time) over a crest of a slope where the whole earth slanted green to
the north. Below it lay green fields and beyond them moaned the sea
with never shore nor island so far as the eye could reach. Among the