Again the voices came—­nay, but there was one voice only, and it called me by my name:  “Oswald, Oswald!”

I stopped and listened, for I thought of Thorgils.  But the voice was silent, and again I pressed on in the blinding snow, and at once it came, wailing: 

“Oswald, Oswald!”

It was behind me now and close at hand, and I turned with my hand on my sword hilt.  But there was nothing.  Only the snow whirled round me, and the wind sung in the rocks.  I called softly, but there was no answer, and I was called no more as I stood still.

“Oswald, Oswald!”

I had turned to go on my way when it came this time, and now I could have sworn that I knew the voice, though whose it was I could not say.

“Who calls me,” I cried, facing round.

Then a chill that was not of cold wind and snow fell on me, for there was silence, and into my mind crept the knowledge of where I had last heard that voice.  It was long years ago—­at Eastdean in half-forgotten Sussex.

“Father!” I cried.  “Father!”

There was no reply, and I stood there for what seemed a long time waiting one.  I called again and again in vain.

“It is weakness,” I said to myself at last, and turned.

At once the voice was wailing, with some wild terror as it seemed, at my very shoulder, with its cry of my name, and I must needs turn once more sharply: 

“Oswald, Oswald!”

My foot struck a stone as I wheeled round, and it grated on others and seemed to stop.  But as I listened for the voice I heard a crash, and yet another, and at last a far-off rumble that was below my very feet, and I sprang with a cry away from the sound, for I knew that I stood on the very brink of some gulf.  And then the snow ceased for a moment and the moon shone out from the break in the clouds, and I saw that my last footprint whence the voice had made me turn was on the edge of an awesome rift that cleft the level surface on the downland, clean cut as by a sword stroke, right athwart my path.  Even in clear daylight I had hardly seen that gulf until I was on its very brink, for I could almost have leapt it, and nought marked its edge.  And in its depths I heard the crash and thunder of prisoned waves.

I do not know that I ever felt such terror as fell on me then.  It was the terror that comes of thinking what might have been, after the danger is past, and that is the worst of all.  I sank down on the snow with my knees trembling, and I clutched at the grass that I might not feel that I must even yet slip into that gulf that was so close, though there was no slope of the ground toward it.  Sheer and sudden it gaped with sharp edges, as the mouth of some monster that waited for prey.

There on the snow I believe that I should have bided to sleep the sleep of the frozen, for I hardly dared to move.  The snow whirled round me again, but I did not heed it, and with a great roar the wind rose and swept up the rift with a sound as of mighty harps, but it did not rouse me.  Only my father’s voice came to me again and called me, and I rose up shaking and followed it as it came from time to time, until I was once more on the track that I had lost.