Battle upon all
Foulness and upon all that did harm and trouble them; and they drove
their Enemies down the Valley, and up the Valley, and did utterly
scatter and put them to flight.

Then did that Man call all his Peoples together; and did make it plain
how that the Darkness grew upon the World, and that the Foul and
dreadful Powers abroad, were like to be more Horrid when a greater Gloom
came.

And he put to them that they Build a Mighty Refuge; and the Peoples did
acclaim; and lo! there was built, presently, a Great House. But the
Great House was not Proper; and that Man did take all the Peoples to
Wander; and they came to the Bight; and there was built at last that
Great and Mighty Pyramid.

Now this is the sense and telling of that book; and but late had I read
it; and talked somewhat of it with my dear friend, the Master
Monstruwacan; but not overmuch; for I had taken so sudden a mind to GO,
that all else had dropped from about me. Yet, to us it did seem clear
that there was no life in all the invisible upper world; and that,
surely, that Great Road whereon the Silent Ones did walk, must be that
same Road which the hardy Peoples of that age did make.

And it did seem wise to the Master Monstruwacan, and unto me, that if
any should find the Lesser Redoubt, they must surely do so somewhere
within the mighty Valley; but whether The Road that led into the West,
where was the Place of the Ab-humans, should bring me to it, I had no
knowing; nor whether it might lie on the Northward way. And I, maybe, to
wander a thousand miles wrong; if, in truth, I were not into some
dreadful trouble before.

And, indeed, no reason of value was there to give me hope that the
Lesser Pyramid lay either to the West, or where the Road went
North-ward, beyond the House of Silence. Yet I did so feel it to be
somewhere to the North, that I had made a determination to search that
way for a great distance, the first; and if I could not come upon aught,
then I should have sober thought that it did lie Westward. But in the
Valley someways, I had feeling of assurance that it must be; for it was
plain that the telling of the book was sound in its bottom sense; as
might be seen; for how should any live in the utter bleak and deadly
chill of the silent upper world that lay an hundred miles up in the
night, hid and lost for ever.

And strange is it to think of those wondrous and mighty cliffs that
girt us about, and yet were fast held from us