Above him stretched the twilight sky, still flushed with fleeting, blood-red clouds, beyond which, from pale green pools of infinite depth, glimmered, here and there, a silvery star. To the right stretched the sombre heath, its rising hills crested with fantastic figures of contorted slain, men and horses stiffened into uncouth and terrible forms; while groaning wounded were heaped between them, their panting anguish not less awful than the silence of the dead.
To his left also were witnesses of battle, but not so many, for on that side the hungry morasses had swallowed them up. To the south and west the measureless fen stretched to the horizon, crimson to its farthest verge with the ensanguined glow of the sun, the tall reeds reddened like warrior's lances that had been dipped in the life-blood of the foe.
The air was full of the awful scent of wounds and blood, and the weird, dank odours of the decaying sedges, while the wailing wind piped and moaned over the wold, swaying the rushes, though scarcely making a ripple on the protected surfaces of the bottomless lagoons.
Mallard and teal and plover came circling back to their haunts in the lonely swamps, now that the din of battle, which had frightened them, was over and done; and, as the twilight deepened, bats and owls came forth with silent wings to hunt their night-roaming prey.
Ralph's open eyes looked only into the sky, and at the wild, wind-driven clouds fleeting across the calm, immutable heavens beyond, as the struggling hosts of mortals fleet over the face of eternity.
His soul was filled with an overwhelming sense of desolation and guilt. He had brought his fate upon himself, and he must face the Shadow of the Valley of Death, all forsworn and blood-stained as he was; alone, helpless. No wife to comfort him, no priest to absolve him,
'Cut off even in the blossoms of his sin,
Unhousel'd, disappointed, unanel'd.'
Against the clear spaces of the sky, he saw, high up, almost above the clouds, an ordered flight of wild swans passing swiftly westward into the sunset glow.
Oh, that he were free as they, winged as the wind! His spirit writhed in fierce rebellion. He put forth all his force in a wild struggle to drag his limbs from the prisoning mass that detained them, but he could not lift the ghastly burden that weighted him to earth an inch.