♢
We walked scrupulously through the floating bodies in Tratracas Lagoon. The stale bog air hung flat like many days drawn long. The morning breath, congealed, bled through my scarf. "Well?" Condan stammered. "You watch your step round all the aphids!" He said 'Aphids' but he didn't mean actual aphids. I shivered and moved my hand away from his head. The surreal thing about this hotbed of drunkenness was that the areas we passed through were less densely populated than you'd expect, even for a bog. We moved quickly through the thicket and began to explore the settlement. Some sort of temporary quietus? We began to reflect; that she was left alone back at the Abbey with nothing but that strange cone-shaped basket we found earlier was a thunderous oversight. By the way, the residential house I found was cluttered with litter -- filthy workaday paper, lonely bottles, wet rags, and so on. It was all entirely menacing. For no particular reason, a man appeared at one house in the eve.