The lucidity, the clarity of the light that afternoon was suffit to itself; perfect transparency must be imperable, these vertical bars of a brass-coloured distillation of light ing down from sulphur-yellow iices in a sky hunkered with grey clouds that bulge with more rain. It struck the wood with nie-stained fingers, the leaves glittered. A cold day of late October, whehered blackberries dangled like their own dour spooks on the discoloured brambles. There were crisp husks of beechmast and cast a cups underfoot in the russet slime of dead bra where the rains of the equinox had so soaked the earth that the cold oozed up through the soles of the shoes, lanating cold of the approag of wihat grips hold of your belly and squeezed it tight. Now the stark elders have an anorexic look; there is not mu the autumn wood to make you smile but it is not yet, not quite yet, the saddest time of the year. Only, there is a haunting sense of the immi cessation of being; the year, in turning, turns in on itself. Introspective weather, a si hush.
The woods enclose. You step between the fir trees and then you are no longer in the open air; the wood swallows you up. There is no way through the wood any more, this wood has reverted to its inal privacy. Once you are i, you must stay there until it lets you out again for there is no clue to guide you through in perfect safety; grass grew over the track years ago and now the rabbits and the foxes make their own runs in the subtle labyrinth and nobody es. The trees stir with a noise like taffeta skirts of women who have lost themselves in woods and hunt round hopelessly for the way out. Tumbling crows play tig in the branches of the elms they clotted with their s, now and then raucously g. A little stream with soft margins of marsh runs through the wood but it has grown sullen with the time of the year; the silent, blackish water this, now, to ice. All will fall still, all lapse.
A young girl would go into the wood as trustingly as Red Riding Hood trannys house but this light admits no ambiguities and, here, she will be trapped in her own illusion because everything in the wood is exactly as it seems.
The woods enclose and then enclose again, like a system of ese boxes opening oo ahe intimate perspectives of the wood ged endlessly around the interloper, the imaginary traveller walking towards an ied distahat perpetually receded before me. It is easy to lose yourself in these woods.
The two notes of the song of a bird rose oill air, as if my girlish and delicious loneliness had been made into a sound. There was a little tangled mist ihickets, mimig the tufts of old mans beard that flossed the lower branches of the trees and bushes; heavy bunches of red berries as ripe and delicious as goblin or ented fruit hung on the hawthorns but the old grass withers, retreats. One by ohe ferns have curled up their hundred eyes and curled bato the earth. The trees threaded a cats cradle of half-stripped branches over me so that I felt I was in a house of s and though the cold wind that always heralds your presence, had I but known it then, blew gentle around me, I thought that nobody was in the wood but me.
Erl-King will do you grievous harm.
Piergly, now, there came again the call of the bird, as desolate as if it came from the throat of the last bird left alive. That call, with all the melancholy of the failing year in it, went directly to my heart.
I walked through the wood unti