CHAPTER 3. THE WAILING WATERS
The wasteland. A long time ago I remember a passage from the great book that speaks of a lone rider, who, not far from here, saw the old world come crashing down upon the new. It was a cold and lonely night, and the wind was blowing hard over the sandy dunes. The passage describes the rider as ‘being sat on his steed, a silhouette painted across the black sky, with the full moon behind him just beyond the horizon.’ As the rider hugged his coat about him to keep out the chill, with his scarf wrapped tightly around his mouth and nose, he saw a star fall from the heavens. A star wrapped in what appeared to be ‘greyish green smoke.’ If this accounting of events is to be believed, ‘the earth was filled with a shrill ringing as of the ears when the star fell.’ It fell not more than a stone’s throw from where he stood, with a loud crush that sent large dust clouds into the air. The moon and the stars in the sky went black in that moment. As if they were candles someone had simply blown out. And so the world was covered in 69
