in the hall of mirrors

Contests

My last exam, in analytic implications of fairy tales, passed – at least in this group: that is, four, of the eight for the first half of the training.

Dramatic: facing one of the most famous living analysts, a third-generation student of von Franz. The pleasant look – she likes me, we have talked – combined with the steely, focused intelligence: she is one of the toughest and most demanding members of the Institute, and her ability to work through complex processes is always remarkable.

My students will be gratified that I received only a 2 – in a context where 1 is excellent, and 4 a failure. But somehow, from her... I don't resent it: a shame it wasn't better, but I don't feel ill-used. It feels a bit like something to be proud of, to get a – what shall we call it, a C+? – from such a person. It is a kind if compliment, to be taken seriously.

I don't mind admitting that afterwards I was dazed: the hot day, the intense midafternoon exam, the sense of getting through hoops, perhaps of fire. My plan before the exam was to go straight to another seminar, but that seemed impossible – another student called after me but I ignored him, walking slowly toward the train station, in a sort of trance, as though needing to go lick my wounds somewhere.

About halfway there, I paused and thought: am I shocked, or embarrassed? A little, yes, but that was already fading under the sense of having held my ground through a terrifically complex labyrinth. A labyrinth not quite solved: but one where I didn't turn away, nor dither.

So I walked back: and under a barrage of: so are you done, how was it, what did she ask you?, I looked slightly glassy-eyed, giving monosyllabic answers.

Luckily, instead of a dense or information-heavy lecture, my next seminar was a distinctly feeling-oriented, creative (yes, you may use the phrase 'touchy-feely' if you prefer) response to masculinity. (Don't laugh.) It was an excellent context to deflate and write several pages – a mildly hallucinatory tale of... well, when I expand it I'll post it here.

The relief of getting to follow through on some complex feeling, a dense tangle of intuitions and internal reflections...

•••

A couple of hours later, as we ended an evening lecture, I managed to get attached to my wonderful group of Italians, with Thomas (from Munich) driving the car. Being somewhat clueless about international sports, it hadn't occurred to me that this was The Penultimate Game, the Big One between Italy and Germany... which we watched around a table at an Italian restaurant, with a variety of people arranged across the main room and the outside terrace. Well, I say "variety of people" – what I mean of course is Italians, Swiss and Germans. And yes, you could tell which were which...

A. was hypercharged, especially after the Italians got their first goal ("Vai! Vai!", both her hands forming the 'horns'). As one end of the table analyzed, discussed, dissected the game and its prospects, my end of the table talked about how the players looked... I thought the Italian coach looked a bit like Berlusconi, but was booed down.

Poor Thomas... he looked increasingly glum after the second Italian goal. Putting my hand on his shoulder, I said, oh, you know, it's just a game... but he said, no, you don't understand: I will get this from all the Italians for at least a week. His Italian girlfriend, an ex-ballet dancer, sent him a text at the end of the game, which basically said: This text isn't for you. Tell the Italians at the table: hurrah, and congratulations...

•••

When we left the restaurant, Thomas had recovered – mostly – but was still a bit subdued. One predictable complication to any group of people that includes either Thomas or Giovanni – or, as in this case, both – is that there is a strong tendency for everything to, rather chaotically, keep going, to walk halfway across town at midnight, talking volubly, to see another café, or another... whatever. An endlessly episodic plot structure; think Orlando Furioso, or the Arabian Nights.

So, although I expected to go home (it seems probable that I'm the official fuddy-duddy of the group), we stopped at a door on an industrial street and went in, with me in the rear asking where the hell were we going, and when I would get to bed...

It was a dance club: an old-fashioned, rather scruffy attic, but pleasant – with various dancers scattered around the dance floor, doing fiercely sensual tangos. Thomas was going to show us his increasingly highly developed tango technique with a variety of Swiss women – one an excellent dancer, one poor, one in between.

The fierce concentration, the blazing focus...

Gifts

Again, in Zürich/Küsnacht at the Jung-Institut, I keep intermittently experiencing myself as bitter, irritable, critical, unfair. Sigh. It's hard to disentangle or clarify this... as always. It doesn't feel as though it's all quite so maddening this time, though – and, also as usual, a number of people obviously experience me as pleasant, fun, even kindly (which I am... if intermittently).

My first exam in Fundamentals went well, if a bit weirdly – an exceptionally, well, idiosyncratic elder analyst somehow took my musical background as a cue for him to talk, for nearly fifteen minutes of the forty allotted, about how much he loved Richard Strauss... seeing the dismayed second examiner looking, only semi-covertly, at her watch, I leapt in with: yes, isn't Strauss fascinating, with all of those anima figures in the operas (name three or four), while his wife Pauline was so heavily animus-ridden but drove him to be creative (explain in two sentences), plus of course his identification with hero and trickster figures in the tone poems (from Till to Nietzsche), and then there's that immense drive towards a sort of final individuation shown in the last works such as Capriccio, Metamorphosen, Four Last Songs...

Anyway, I passed that one. With a first (he said, ever the proud schoolboy). Three more to go, including a distinctly exasperating one about Buddhism and psychotherapy. (They might fit together, but then again they might not, depending on what you are emphasizing, and whether you are feeling particularly dogmatically Zen-ish that day.)

This afternoon, while reading and taking notes, I was also musing uneasily on the emotional awkwardness I often see in myself here. And then I was looking at a postcard, tilted on the nightstand next to the bed in my small but Swisstically neat apartment – it is from Philip, another student; on Thursday, I think it was, we were chatting idly in the library, and he suddenly turned to the woman at the desk and bought two copies of a new postcard they have made with a mandala that Jung drew, and gave me one, saying, Here's a gift for you. I was slightly startled – Philip is senior to me here; he has about another year of studies, has been a surgeon all his life, and has just retired permanently from medicine to do this work (literally a few days before we started this set of training weeks). He has always been intelligent and businesslike, sometimes gruff or even humorously bitter – but he is obviously ecstatic to have left the scalpel behind (having done it so long – the Jungian idea that you want to do something very different in the second half of life). Giving me that postcard out of the blue was perhaps just part of the effervescence that he seemed to have for everything that day.

(That mandala... I've seen the original in Bob Hinshaw's sitting room in Daimon Verlag, in Einsiedeln – a Jungian publishing house. Someone had decided years ago to tape it to cardboard, then cover it in some kind of cellophane, neither of which held up well. It's good to see someone made a decent reproduction of it – despite his disclaimers, Jung could draw quite well, as you can see in the Red Book.)

Then, while I was studying over lunch in the student room, Carlos was roaming around and taking photographs of favorite places. A picture of me with The Great Man (Jung did hate the 'great' thing, and didn't even want to allow for a Jung-Institut) was another gift, along with pictures through some of the round stained-glass windows into the garden.

These casually kindly gifts... perhaps I shouldn't worry too much about being so annoying: somehow there seems to be something there, not something logical, but something that can draw my attention....

Packing

... no, not *that* kind.

I'm off to Zürich in an hour – the Jung-Institut, seminars, and my first series of exams. The weather is very warm there at the moment – entirely unlike here; trying to pack a variety of things, of course.

Do you remember Sunday Bloody Sunday? Peter Finch and the incredible Glenda Jackson spend the first few minutes of the film getting ready to go away for the weekend (with the same younger guy, as it happens, though they don't know that yet). It's simple but absolutely hilarious, and impossible to forget – Finch, with the exquisite trio from Cosí fan tutte playing in the background, carefully and calmly puts things away, packs meticulously, makes sure the kitchen is clean, and walks to the door. But Glenda throws junk across the room, yanks clothes from a closet to toss them in a bag, walks through a kitchen that looks like it is at the end of a three-day party, tosses a cigarette butt toward the sink without looking to see where it lands, and strides out the door.

I, of course, do the Finch thing, though not as calmly.

... Is that the taxi for the airport?...

Changes and recoveries

A remarkable analysis session today... after feeling stuck for some weeks, rapid inner change and reflection. I walked away thinking of fun house mirrors – how one inevitably looks at oneself and the world through all kinds of distortions; and the power of analysis is the increasing ability to sense the distortions, to become easily skeptical about ideas or feelings that don't seem worth holding on to....

And it is remarkable to have a shadow figure in a dream tease me – intending fun of the kind that should reflect intimacy and trust – and that I would be so enraged, so utterly furious. This is, after all, my usual response: I am always the ruthlessly serious little boy with glasses, looking both utterly stricken and deeply angry when anyone makes fun of him – and no, I will still probably never be good at taking a ribbing of any kind. (Which is slightly unfortunate here in northern England – where, like Australia, Bali, Thailand, and other cultures, making fun of people is the social norm. But, as usual, I'll get along somehow.)

I can't help also connecting this with my current concern: of the four Jung-Institut exams I'll take in a couple of weeks, the one on ethnology, which somehow (?) ended up being about Buddhism and analysis, is by far the least prepared; so, I am reading, frantically. In some ways you can fit the two processes together, in other ways they seem diametrically opposed (especially if you get too concerned about the immediate surface of Zen practice)... but is one supposed to go into the feelings, the past, the experience, mucky as it is, or try to hold oneself above and away from it? Ah well I suppose that's the point of the exam: to untie a few knots, and then to go ahead re-tie a few, and show that I know where they are.

•••

And in other changes, some famous deaths – Dietrich Fischer Dieskau; it was perfect that Alex Ross said he was the "heart" of the great original recording of Britten's War Requiem, because that is absolutely true. The other performers are wonderful, but you end up becoming Dieskau, seeing the whole war through his eyes. Ross quotes a shattering passage from the young Fischer-Dieskau's journal, when he was a teenage soldier in the midst of World War Two – already reflective in the midst of terrible things, the boy writes: "yet there is something stubborn that keeps saying, you are going to live."

I should take something from that, I guess.

•••

And Ray Bradbury. Yes, he wrote a number of books that are famous; yes, the Martian Chronicles and Something Wicked This Way Comes are amazing. But the really important book is Dandelion Wine, and if you haven't read it, you are missing something that you... well, that you need.

And I say that as someone who didn't grow up anywhere near the Midwest, nor in a small town.

The problem of the new lawnmower, John's farewell, the Ladies' Lodge and the ridiculous potion, Mrs. Bentley relearning time, Douglas' terrible fever and Mr. Jonas' rescue, the replacement for Leo's machine... the intense calm of Great-Grandmother's death....

But my huge, huge favorite is always the chapter where Aunt Rose buys Grandma glasses and completely organizes her kitchen, thereby ruining her chaotically magical ability with food. They finally, and comically, rid themselves of Aunt Rose – but Grandma (still wearing those glasses) hasn't gotten her talent back, and runs weeping from the dining room. It's too long to quote the whole chapter, but things aren't really rescued until after midnight:

"Then he began to move. He took the baking powder out of its fine new tin and put it in an old flour sack the way it had always been. He dusted the white flour into an old cookie crock. He removed the sugar from the metal bin marked sugar and sifted it into a familiar series of smaller bins marked spices, cutlery, string. He put the cloves where they had lain for years, littering the bottom of half a dozen drawers. He brought the dishes and the knives and forks and spoons back out on top of the tables.

"He found Grandma's new eyeglasses on the parlor mantel and hid them in the cellar. He kindled a great fire in the old wood-burning stove, using pages from the new cookbook. By one o'clock in the still morning a huge husking roar shot up in the black stovepipe, such a wild roar that the house, if it had ever slept at all, awoke. He heard the rustle of Grandma's slippers down the hall stairs. She stood in the kitchen, blinking at the chaos. Douglas was hidden behind the pantry door.

"At one-thirty in the deep dark summer morning, the cooking odors blew up through the windy corridors of the house. Down the stairs, one by one, came women in curlers, men in bathrobes, to tiptoe and peer into the kitchen – lit only by fitful gusts of red fire from the hissing stove. And there in the black kitchen at two of a warm summer morning, Grandma floated like an apparition, amidst bangings and clatterings, half blind once more, her fingers groping instinctively in the dimness, shaking out spice clouds over bubbling pots and simmering kettles, her face in the firelight red, magical, and enchanted as she seized and stirred and poured the sublime foods.

"Quiet, quiet, the boarders laid the best linens and gleaming silver and lit candles rather than switch on electric lights and snap the spell.

"Grandfather, arriving home from a late evening's work at the printing office, was startled to hear grace being said in the candlelit dining room.

"As for the food? The meats were deviled, the sauces curried, the greens mounded with sweet butter, the biscuits splashed with jeweled honey; everything toothsome, luscious, and so miraculously refreshing that a gentle lowing broke out as from a pasturage of beasts gone wild in clover. One and all cried out their gratitude for their loose-fitting night clothes.

"At three-thirty on Sunday morning, with the house warm with eaten food and friendly spirits, Grandfather pushed back his chair and gestured magnificently. From the library he fetched a copy of Shakespeare. He laid it on a platter, which he presented to his wife.

"'Grandma', he said, 'I ask only that tomorrow night for supper you cook us this very fine volume. I am certain we all agree that by the time it reaches the table tomorrow at twilight it will be delicate, succulent, brown and tender as the breast of the autumn pheasant.'

"Grandma held the book in her hands and cried happily."

•••

I think Ray will sleep deep in Green Town tonight....

Late; sleepy

As we veer away from the full moon... and the weather returns to the dim gray rainy quality it's had so much for the past weeks.

A sense of impending complication, entanglement, or loss; of ventures foundering, of things not going... well, as planned.

As though the entire idea of planning things, of trying to engineer life and events, is innately dangerous, and always leads to disappointment – or to things costing more than anyone expected that they would: the bargains of Faust, of the magician, who is finally left with nothing...

Perhaps it is nothing; or the doubtful dreams of a middle-aged man.

To bed....

An unfinished fairy tale...

[My analyst told me about a brilliant exercise they did at the Jung-Institut in the 1980s – something we should do again, I think: write a fairy tale. I started this one last fall: it aims for some sort of journey or change... I haven't written more on this one; I may put it aside and go write something else in the same line; we'll see.]

There once was an aging king in a quiet kingdom…

He walked through the castle afternoons, although it didn't seem to change much from day to day. Most of the rooms were silent, and merely dusty; he tended to avoid the armory, which reminded him of old battles, and also the rooms where young people had lived, where there had been parties and laughter. The walls of the grander hallways were lined with large, heavily framed paintings of dead kings, queens, and noble men and ladies, some of whom he remembered; there were paintings that were very beautiful, and others that were a bit ridiculous, and he was a bit sorry for the artists who had been hired to make something out of such faces. He went past the passageway that led to the treasury rather quickly, because he was fairly sure that the floor could be seen in many spots around the room; but it wasn't bare yet, so there was no point in looking. He was more comfortable in the vast library, which contained an enormous collection of tomes and scrolls of all kinds, in good order if a bit dusty; but he had to admit that it no longer gave him as much pleasure as it did once.

There were testaments to past glories – framed treaties, plans of the schools that had been built for the kingdom’s children, pictures from every angle of the great park that lay around the castle, records and drawings from the quest that went to the foot of the mountains and back – and they were all in good condition. But they were also a bit stale, a bit dusty – and when he looked down from a balcony, he could see that the park was still kept well enough, but it seemed duller than when it was new, and the gardeners seemed to keep the same plants going year after year; and they all looked a bit older and shabbier.

He rarely saw the few servants; they generally left meals, at fairly regular intervals, in the big, silent banquet hall, which did have cobwebs in the corners, though it didn't seem worth pointing them out to anybody; and they apparently took the plates away after he left the room. If he looked from the balconies on one side of the banquet hall, he could see down the hill from the castle, and there were all the homes of the people, with herds and farms, shops and taverns. It all looked fairly stable, and seemed comfortable enough, but not many of them ever ventured up the hill, since the castle had gotten a bit of a reputation for having ghosts in it; and, in any case, there was little need for them to speak to the king or the few remaining officials, let alone the servants.

One evening, as he was looking down on the lights of the town, he heard a sound behind him and turned around. He couldn’t see anything, but he thought he heard a sort of chiming, a ringing that suggested a voice, almost like words that had somehow been turned into bells. He lifted a torch from a sconce – it took a strong pull – and walked toward the sounds, and then he realized that they were moving – and they kept moving, across the hall with its empty bedrooms, down several staircases to the great hall and along the length of it, the torch flickering as he walked across the big empty space. At the far end was a small door he couldn’t remember seeing before, and the sounds seemed to disappear into it – but it was locked; he wandered around for a while, vaguely looking to see some sort of key; and finally he went to bed, thinking, with some surprise, that here was something that he actually wanted to do.

The next day, he went down staircase after staircase all the way to the great kitchen, which he hadn’t visited since he was a child, when his nurse brought him down to show him around the then busy, bustling castle. The kitchen wasn’t as he remembered it – there was just a middle-aged woman stirring a pot before the fire as a maid slept, a scrubbing brush in one hand and another pot in the other, near enough to stay warm. The cook was startled – she had not seen the king for years, and perhaps she didn’t even recognize him at first; but she collected herself and curtseyed clumsily, while drips from the ladle fell onto the floor. She nudged the kitchen maid with her foot as she said, Your Majesty, why, whatever are you doing down here?

He didn’t quite know how to ask about the voice with the bells in it, about the small door he had found, so he said, his voice a bit rough from lack of use, Steady on, and, As you were. After thinking for a moment, he asked, hesitantly: can you tell me – what do we do in the castle when we see, or hear, something strange? I mean – I’m sorry, I’m not making myself clear – who can we ask about things that are, well, unusual? The cook was at a loss for a moment, but then she said, Well, down here we sometimes ask the old woman who comes around begging, round about lunch time. With your Majesty’s pardon – she suddenly looked a bit nervous – but I do give her a bit of food, most days. He said, no that’s all right, well done, it's good of you to… so, is she going to be here today? Ah well I can’t tell you that for sure, Sire, but the chances are good. Well, would you mind if I waited here in the kitchen? It’s warm, and… By now the kitchen maid was fully awake and gaping at him in astonishment, and the cook turned to her and said, Get up there Mary, find his majesty a nice chair, one with a nice comfortable cushion if you can. And so he sat for a bit, watching the cook, who stopped being nervous after a while and continued making the stew, occasionally commenting on what she put into it for his dinner: it’s good meat, and it’s worth an onion to keep off colds, here are some nice vegetables from the kitchen garden.

After he had sat for a while, he heard bells from the church in the town – twelve, he counted, so it must be midday already; and on the last bell there came a call from the door ajar to the back garden: Give food, give alms, give help, and what shall not be given to you! The cook looked slightly nervous but said, Well there you are, she is here today! And that’s what she always says, I wouldn’t pay too much mind to it though, she’s poor as ditchwater and can’t hardly walk besides, she can’t give anybody much of anything, I thinks. The king stood and straightened his clothes a bit, wondering exactly how to ask what he wanted to ask, as the old woman came in slowly on a crutch, hobbling into the room with a purposeful walk, as though she owned it. Won’t you sit down, good mother, he said to her, pulling forward the wooden chair the maid had gotten for him; and the old woman caught sight of him and she said, Ah, here’s one!

Here’s one what?, he thought, but then realized that might be rude, so he stood and watched as the cook ladled some stew into a bowl for the old woman and she ate with gusto. When she had eaten it all, he asked, tentatively, Good mother, do you know anything about – about a voice like bells? And in this castle, it's upstairs, there is a small door, but I cannot find the key… His voice trailed off, thinking, how silly these questions sound, she has no idea what I’m talking about. But the old lady, whose eyes seemed brighter and her face fuller after she finished the stew, wagged her finger at him: The door, the door! Of course you can’t find the key! They are there, you know, all of them… but they can’t come out (she chuckled, was it with malice or with anticipation?); they can’t come out, they can’t, unless the one with the gold heart touches the door, just so.

The one with the gold heart? Who is… But the old lady was already hobbling towards the door and the spring air outside. Madam, I insist, you really must tell me – But she turned and put a finger over her lips, and said, No more would I tell you, no more will I tell you, no more can I tell you. And she turned again to the doorway and walked through it, crying, Give food, give alms, give help, and what shall not be given to you! And, faster than he would have thought possible with a crutch, she was gone.

The king looked helplessly at the cook and the maid, who seemed to be waiting for him to do something; after mumbling a sort of thanks, he turned and walked back up the stairs, conscious that years spent alone upstairs had lost him the manners that had been drilled into him in the royal nursery – not to mention proper ways to speak to servants. By the time he had reached the great hall, he forgot about all that, as he started to wonder: so, where is the one with the gold heart?... He walked restlessly from one end of the hall to the other, occasionally glancing sideways at the small door each time he walked toward it. Finally tired of wondering, he climbed back up to look at the town on one side of the castle, then the forest on the other, crossing and recrossing the hall as though he would trip over an answer somewhere, if he only looked long enough.

It was growing dark, and the steady light of the evening star glowed at one side of the sky, when he suddenly realized: I won’t find any answers here. I've walked through every room a thousand times, even the empty ones; I've read the books and looked through the maps, it's not there either. I need to go, to go... somewhere. He looked straight up at the evening star, turning over this new idea, and realized he was actually getting interested – excited, even – at the prospect: something, something new....

Something: anything at all.

He didn't want to disturb the kitchen again, and in any case they would be making his dinner, though he didn't much want it now. One of the remaining footmen lived up a few floors, on the south side of the castle; although he hadn't seen the man in months, or perhaps it had been a few years, occasionally he could hear the clack of boots on the uncarpeted stairs that went up to the old servant's quarters. Muttering to himself, he went up past the floor where the royal bedroom was, past several floors of silent guest and meeting rooms, and looked up a narrow, unlit staircase. He had to hoist his robe a bit, and turn a little sideways, but he reached the top, hardly puffing at all. The corridor was dark, but as he paused, he heard a scratching sound, and an open stone doorway several rooms down to the left showed a glow of candlelight. He straightened up and walked over to the doorway and stood in it, framed with the dark hall behind him. A thin, rather elderly man, wearing livery but with a warm pullover over top of it, stood at the table, where several decks of old, bent cards were spread out in a large pattern of some kind of complicated solitaire. When the king coughed slightly the man turned, but the sight of the figure in the doorway caused him to gasp and drop the candleholder, and the light went out. The king said, Steady now, it's me, from downstairs – and a few confused mutual apologies gradually resolved as the man found a match on the table and lit another candle. After looking at the king for a moment – perhaps to make sure he wasn't a ghost, or some reflection from the candle – the footman said, It’s Jarvis, sir, begging your pardon. Thank you, Jarvis, I'm sorry to have startled you. I'd like to – well, I’d like to go for a trip. Or really a long walk, perhaps – tomorrow morning, if that’s all right. Is there travel clothing – nothing flashy, just something I can walk through the woods wearing, that will be strong and rather, I suppose, informal? Jarvis thought for a moment, and said, Informal, eh, I suppose there is hunting gear, leather breeches and warm jackets. I could clean some armor, if you thought – No, no armor, that won't be necessary. It's not as though I'm going jousting or anything, is it?

Jarvis didn’t laugh at this, but seemed to be getting a bit excited himself – it had been years, the king realized, since he had been given much to prepare or clean. He looked as though he was trying to remember just what one needs for a journey, even one without horses or attendants; for several hours after the king went downstairs Jarvis kept trudging down to ask, And how about a good hunting knife? What if I ask the kitchen to put some food in a knapsack? Finally he asked, And wouldn't you like me to come with you, to, well, make sure that things are all right? The king said no, I think I'll go alone this time, at which Jarvis looked rather disappointed. But this will be just a few days, perhaps, and next time we can both go see something interesting. Jarvis had to be content with that, and he went back up to his attic, leaving the king alone with his thoughts.

The next morning, he found clothing left by Jarvis in his dressing room. Breeches, a couple of large broadcloth shirts, a jacket – with the boots and knife, a fair selection that looked anonymous but comfortable enough. He had practically finished dressing when the footman showed up at the door – the man looked slightly disappointed, as though he would have liked to be useful, but hurried to help with the jacket. The kitchen will have some breakfast for you, he said – thank you but I think I should get moving, said the king. How about just – well, some food for the road, you know – the way we did when we were young… I assume they have dried meat, some way-bread, maybe an apple or two. Yes, sir, I think all of that is ready –

The king managed to keep the fussing to a minimum, and passed the kitchen quietly as he went to the back of the castle, to leave, not by the great gate, but by a smaller door off a rather dusty passage. There were no people in sight on this side of the castle, and few buildings as you looked down the hill, perhaps a distant roof; that seemed right to him, and he began to feel a certain relief, a relaxation of a feeling he hadn’t known was there. He walked across the lawns, starting down the hill and veering gradually toward his left; it seemed that no one was out on this side of the castle, and he glanced over the lawns and paths that went toward the castle’s graveyard. The graveyard itself was old, the memorials …

... 

The forest grew up gradually around him, from gnarled bushes to trees; certainly at one time people from the castle, and the town, would have cleared more of the brush, but now it glowed with dim greenish reflections of the glints of sun that filtered through the leaves. The forest felt sheltered, safe: the sounds of birds and small animals made him wonder why he had waited so long to leave the dusty, cool castle rooms. There did seem to be a vague path – sometimes visible, sometimes more a matter of finding the less cluttered tangles of trees and fallen branches.

...