He lurched ashore, his feet caked with enormous clods as of melting chocolate.

A filthy scramble left him smeared and disheveled on the summit.

He had come for nothing.

The mound lay vacant, a tangled patch, a fragment of wilderness.
Yet as he stood panting, there rose a puny, miserable sound.

What presence could lurk there?
The distress, it might be, of some small animal--a rabbit dying in a forgotten trap.