Resolute, though wearied and faint, firm in resolve, though with a bitter loneliness at his heart, Hyla plunged on through the twilight. For some little time the ground had been much firmer and a little raised above the level of the fen, but as day was dying, he found he had entered upon a long and gradual slope, and that once more it behoved him to walk with infinite care.
Old rotting tree-trunks cropped up here and there, relics of some vast, ancient forest, which, mingling with rotting vegetation of all kinds, sent up a smell of decay in his nostrils. At every step he sank up to the knees, and brown water, the colour of brandy, splashed up to his waist.
He seemed to have arrived at a more desolate evil part of the fens than before. The approaching night made his progress more and more difficult. It was here that the night herons had their nests and breeding-places, inaccessible to men. The ground was bespattered with their excrements, and with feathers, broken egg-shells, old nests, and half-eaten fish covered with yellow flies.
Then as he ploughed on he saw a sight at which even his stout heart failed him. His long struggle seemed suddenly all in vain. Right before him was a wide creek or arm of the lake, two hundred yards from reeds to reedy shore, entirely barring the way. Too far for him to swim, all dead-weary as he was, mysterious and ugly in the faint light, it gave him over utterly to despair.
It began to be cold, and the chilly marish-vapour crept into his bones and turned the marrow of them to ice.
He sat on a mound formed by a great log and the dèbris of a mass of decayed roots, the whole damp and cold as a fish's belly, and covered with living fungi and slimy moss. His feet were buried in the brown water.
It was now too dark to move in any direction with safety, and until day should break again he must remain where he was. He had no more food of any kind, and was absolutely exhausted. So he moaned a little prayer, more from habit than from any comfort in the act, and stretching himself over the damp moss fell into a fitful sleep. He dreamed he was back at the Priory, and heard in his dreaming the distant sound of the monks singing prayers.
It was a picture of his own life, this sorry end to all his day's endeavour. It fore-shadowed his career, so rapidly darkening down into death. His life-path, trod with such bitterness, growing ever more devious and painful, while the ignes fatui of Hope danced round its closing miles!