A gray mist continually gathered behind me. When I looked back towards
the past, this mist was the medium through which my eyes had to strain
for a vision of what had gone by; and the form of the white lady had
receded into an unknown region. At length the country of rock began
to close again around me, gradually and slowly narrowing, till I found
myself walking in a gallery of rock once more, both sides of which I
could touch with my outstretched hands. It narrowed yet, until I
was forced to move carefully, in order to avoid striking against the
projecting pieces of rock. The roof sank lower and lower, until I was
compelled, first to stoop, and then to creep on my hands and knees.
It recalled terrible dreams of childhood; but I was not much afraid,
because I felt sure that this was my path, and my only hope of leaving
Fairy Land, of which I was now almost weary.

At length, on getting past an abrupt turn in the passage, through
which I had to force myself, I saw, a few yards ahead of me, the
long-forgotten daylight shining through a small opening, to which the
path, if path it could now be called, led me. With great difficulty I
accomplished these last few yards, and came forth to the day. I stood on
the shore of a wintry sea, with a wintry sun just a few feet above its
horizon-edge. It was bare, and waste, and gray. Hundreds of hopeless
waves rushed constantly shorewards, falling exhausted upon a beach
of great loose stones, that seemed to stretch miles and miles in both
directions. There was nothing for the eye but mingling shades of
gray; nothing for the ear but the rush of the coming, the roar of the
breaking, and the moan of the retreating wave. No rock lifted up a
sheltering severity above the dreariness around; even that from which I
had myself emerged rose scarcely a foot above the opening by which I
had reached the dismal day, more dismal even than the tomb I had left.
A cold, death-like wind swept across the shore, seeming to issue from a
pale mouth of cloud upon the horizon. Sign of life was nowhere visible.
I wandered over the stones, up and down the beach, a human imbodiment of
the nature around me. The wind increased; its keen waves flowed through
my soul; the foam rushed higher up the stones; a few dead stars began
to gleam in the east; the sound of the waves grew louder and yet more
despairing. A dark curtain of cloud was lifted up, and a pale blue rent
shone between its foot and the edge of the sea, out from which rushed an
icy storm of frozen wind, that tore the waters into spray as it passed,
and flung the billows in raving heaps upon the desolate shore. I could
bear it no longer.