Mary couldnt sleep. Every time she closed her eyes, something made her sway and lurch as if she were at the brink of a precipice, and she snapped awake, teh fear.
This happehree, four, five times, until she realized that sleep was not going to e; so she got up and dressed quietly, and stepped out of the house and away from the tree with its tentlike branches under which Will and Lyra were sleeping.
The moon was bright and high in the sky. There was a lively wind, and the great landscape was mottled with cloud-shadows, moving, Mary thought, like the migration of some herd of unimaginable beasts. But animals migrated for a purpose; when you saw herds of reindeer moving across the tundra, or wildebeest crossing the savanna, you khey were going where the food was, or to places where it was good to mate and bear offspring. Their movement had a meaning. These clouds were moving as the result of pure ce, the effect of utterly random events at the level of atoms and molecules; their shadows speeding over the grassland had no meaning at all.
heless, they looked as if they did. They looked tense and driven with purpose. The whole night did. Mary felt it, too, except that she didnt know what that purpose was. But unlike her, the clouds seemed to know what they were doing and why, and the wind knew, and the grass khe entire world was alive and scious.
Mary climbed the slope and looked back across the marshes, where the ining tide laced a brilliant silver through the glistening dark of the mudflats and the reed beds. The cloud-shadows were very clear down there; they looked as if they were fleeing something frightful behind them, or hastening to embraething wonderful ahead. But what that was, Mary would never know.
She turoward the grove where her climbing tree stood. It was twenty minutes walk away; she could see it clearly, t high and tossing its great head in a dialogue with the urgent wind. They had things to say, and she couldhem.
She hurried toward it, moved by the excitement of the night, and desperate to join in. This was the very thing shed told Will about when he asked if she missed God: it was the sehat the whole universe was alive, and that everything was ected to everything else by threads of meaning. When shed been a Christian, she had felt ected, too; but when she left the Church, she felt loose and free and light, in a universe without purpose.
And then had e the discovery of the Shadows and her journey into another world, and now this vivid night, and it lain that everything was throbbing with purpose and meaning, but she was cut off from it. And it was impossible to find a e, because there was no God.
Half iation and half in despair, she resolved to climb her tree and try once again to lose herself in the Dust.
But before shed even gone halfway to the grove she heard a different sound among the lashing of the leaves and the streaming of the wind through the grass. Something was groaning, a deep, somber note like an an. And above that, the sound of crag, snapping and breaking, and the squeal and scream of wood on wood.
Surely it couldnt be her tree?
She stopped where she was, in the open grassland, with the wind lashing her fad the cloud-shadows rag past her and the tall grasses whippihighs, and watched the opy of the grove. Boughs groawigs snapped, great balks of green wood snapped off like dry sticks and fell all the long way to the ground, and then the itself,