Sir Nigel : Large Print

In the month of July of the year 1348, between the feasts of St.

Benedict and of St.Swithin, a strange thing came upon England, for out of the east there drifted amonstrous cloud, purple and piled, heavy with evil, climbing slowly up the hushedheaven.

In the shadow of that strange cloud the leaves drooped in the trees, thebirds ceased their calling, and the cattle and the sheep gathered cowering underthe hedges.

A gloom fell upon all the land, and men stood with their eyes upon thestrange cloud and a heaviness upon their hearts.

They crept into the churcheswhere the trembling people were blessed and shriven by the trembling priests.Outside no bird flew, and there came no rustling from the woods, nor any of thehomely sounds of Nature.

All was still, and nothing moved, save only the great cloudwhich rolled up and onward, with fold on fold from the black horizon.

To the westwas the light summer sky, to the east this brooding cloud-bank, creeping everslowly across, until the last thin blue gleam faded away and the whole vast sweep ofthe heavens was one great leaden arch.Then the rain began to fall.

All day it rained, and all the night and all the week andall the month, until folk had forgotten the blue heavens and the gleam of thesunshine.

It was not heavy, but it was steady and cold and unceasing, so that thepeople were weary of its hissing and its splashing, with the slow drip from theeaves.

Always the same thick evil cloud flowed from east to west with the rainbeneath it.

None could see for more than a bow-shot from their dwellings for thedrifting veil of the rain-storms.

Every morning the folk looked upward for a break,but their eyes rested always upon the same endless cloud, until at last they ceasedto look up, and their hearts despaired of ever seeing the change.

It was raining atLammas-tide and raining at the Feast of the Assumption and still raining atMichaelmas.

The crops and the hay, sodden and black, had rotted in the fields, forthey were not worth the garnering.

The sheep had died, and the calves also, sothere was little to kill when Martinmas came and it was time to salt the meat for thewinter.

They feared a famine, but it was worse than famine which was in store forthem.