find the
creation of the living God, instead of the old, hard barren form
of bygone living. Sometimes great terror possessed her.
Sometimes she lost touch, she lost her feeling, she could only
know the old horror of the husk which bound in her and all
mankind. They were all in prison, they were all going mad.

She saw the stiffened bodies of the colliers, which seemed
already enclosed in a coffin, she saw their unchanging eyes, the
eyes of those who are buried alive: she saw the hard, cutting
edges of the new houses, which seemed to spread over the
hillside in their insentient triumph, the triumph of horrible,
amorphous angles and straight lines, the expression of
corruption triumphant and unopposed, corruption so pure that it
is hard and brittle: she saw the dun atmosphere over the
blackened hills opposite, the dark blotches of houses, slate
roofed and amorphous, the old church-tower standing up in
hideous obsoleteness above raw new houses on the crest of the
hill, the amorphous, brittle, hard edged new houses advancing
from Beldover to meet the corrupt new houses from Lethley, the
houses of Lethley advancing to mix with the houses of Hainor, a
dry, brittle, terrible corruption spreading over the face of the
land, and she was sick with a nausea so deep that she perished
as she sat. And then, in the blowing clouds, she saw a band of
faint iridescence colouring in faint colours a portion of the
hill. And forgetting, startled, she looked for the hovering
colour and saw a rainbow forming itself. In one place it gleamed
fiercely, and, her heart anguished with hope, she sought the
shadow of iris where the bow should be. Steadily the colour
gathered, mysteriously, from nowhere, it took presence upon
itself, there was a faint, vast rainbow. The arc bended and
strengthened itself till it arched indomitable, making great
architecture of light and colour and the space of heaven, its
pedestals luminous in the corruption of new houses on the low
hill, its arch the top of heaven.

And the rainbow stood on the earth. She knew that the sordid
people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the
world's corruption were living still, that the rainbow was
arched in their blood and would quiver to life in their spirit,
that they would cast off their horny covering of disintegration,
that new, clean, naked bodies would issue to a new germination,
to a new growth, rising to the light and the wind and the clean
rain of heaven.