It was a day of sunlight so faint it seemed dead, like some gleam refracted onto the pale bright sky, and so to earth, rather than any direct outflow; the quiet air was only stirred by the swish of scythes from the sloping cliff where two men cut the crisp bracken down for litter for cattle.  The time of year had fallen upon rust—­brown-rust were the bells of the dried heath, the spires of wall-pennywort that lurked in the crannies of the boulders; blood-rust were the wisps of dead sorrel that stood up into the sunlight; fawn-rust were the hemlocks with their spidery umbels, and a deader fawn were the masses of seeded hemp-agrimony, whose once plumy heads were now become mere frothy tufts of down, that blew against Blanche’s dress as she passed, and clung there.

Swish-swish ... came the even sweep of the scythes, a whispering sound that irritated Blanche and somehow disarranged her carefully-prepared sentences before ever they had a chance to reach her tongue.  She felt that here, on the rust-red cliff, with that deadly scything sounding in their ears, Ishmael would get the better of her, and she turned through the bracken to where an overgrown track led to what had once been a series of tiny gardens set on the cliff and walled in with thick elder.  There at least they could be hidden from the eyes of any stray labourers, and with less space about her she felt she would find her task easier.  Ishmael followed her with a heart that warned him of dread to come.  Always afterwards he avoided those dead gardens on the cliff that he had been wont to like to wander in.

They stretched, some dozen or so of them, down the slope, divided up thus for better protection against the wind.  The close-set hedges of elder were bare as skeletons, but so thickly entwined as, even so, to form dense screens, only broken at the corners to allow of passing from one little garden to the next and the next, both below and to one side.  In his childhood they had belonged to an old man who cultivated them assiduously and sent in the produce to the weekly market at Penzance, and then, in their patchwork brightness as narcissi and wall flowers, violets, or beans and young potatoes, flourished there, they had deserved their name of jewel-gardens, and to himself he had always called them “the hanging gardens of Babylon”—­a phrase that had filled him with a sense of joy.  Now they had been long neglected, and the bare earth crumbled underfoot; even grass or weeds seemed afraid to grow there.  Dead, quiet, and still, they were become sinister little squares of earth, shrouded by those contorted elders, dry and brown as they.

Blanche paused by a tall hedge and stood with her back against it, her arms outflung on either side and her head up bravely.  Ishmael had a moment of looking round blindly as though he were in some trap from which he could not escape, as though the walls of dead elder had grown together and were penning him in.  Then he faced her and spoke.