Chapter Thirty-Four, There is Now Summary

Mary is wakeful and finally gives up trying to sleep. She feels that everything, the clouds, the trees, everything is alive and communicating. She goes outside to climb her platform into the tree, but the wind gets stronger and her tree falls down. She looks up with her spyglass and sees Dust moving faster than ever before into emptiness. She puts together all she has learned about the changes in different worlds that happened at about the same time three hundred years earlier. She realizes that the cuts made by the knife have caused the "leakage" of Dust. She realizes the moon, the stars, the trees, the clouds—everything, is trying to hold back the disappearance of Dust.

As she returns to the village, she sees one of the birds (maybe; they always move...