"The Dupont campus ... The moon had turned the university's buildings into a vast chiaroscuro of dark shapes brought out in all their sumptuousness by a wash of pale white gold. The towers, the turrets, the spires, the heavy slate roofs-all of it ineffably beautiful and ineffably grand. Walls thick as a castle's! It was a stronghold. He, Hoyt, was one of a charmed circle, that happy few who could enter the stronghold at will ... and feel its invincibility in their bones. Not only that, he was in the innermost ring of that charmed circle, namely Saint Ray, the fraternity of those who have been chosen to hold dominion over ... well, over everybody." (Prologue, pg. 11)

"Not all that long ago the mountains were a wall that cut Alleghany County off from people in the rest of North Carolina so completely, they called it the Lost Province, when they thought...