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edge of the crowd of Cornishmen, but made no attempt to reach him. This was a time simply to wait and see what might happen next. The men seemed to be gathering in one group, the women moving away. All at once Mrs Penhallow was at Jane’s side again.
    â€œCome, let me show ’ee where to go, m’dear. Now, as the sun comes up, the men do put the Greenwitch to cliff.” She smiled at Jane, half earnest, half offering a self-conscious apology. “For luck, you see, and for good fishing and a good harvest. So they say. . . . But we must keep our distance, to give them a clear run.” She beckoned, and Jane followed her away from the Greenwitch to the side of the headland. She had only half an idea what this was all about.
    The men began to crowd round the Greenwitch. Some touched it ostentatiously, laughing, calling aloud a wish. For the first time, in the growing daylight, Jane noticed that the square, leaf-woven figure had been built on a kind of platform, like a huge tray made of boards, and that this platform had a heavy wheel at each corner, carefully wedged with big stones. Calling and whooping, the men pulled the stones from the wheels, and Jane saw the figure sway as the platform moved free. Greenwitch was perhaps half again as high as a man, but very broad for its height, with its huge square head almost as wide as its body. It did not look like a copy of a human being. It looked, Jane thought, like a single representative of a fearful unknown species, from another planet, or from some unthinkably distant part of our own past.
    â€œHeave, boys!” a voice called. The men had attached ropes to all four sides of the platform; they milled round, holding,steadying, gently pulling the swaying image towards the end of the headland. Greenwitch lumbered forward. Jane could smell the heavy scent of the hawthorn. The blossoms seemed brighter, the green boughs of Greenwitch’s sides almost luminous; she realised that inland, over the moors beyond Trewissick, the sun was coming up. Yellow light blazed out over them; a cheer rose from the crowd, and the platform with the green figure moved almost to the clutter of rocks at the edge of the cliff.
    Suddenly a shout, high-pitched as a scream, rang out over the crowd; Jane jumped, and turned to see a scuffle of jostling bodies at the edge of the crowd. A man seemed to be trying to break through; she glimpsed a dark-haired head, the face twisted with fury, and then the group closed again.
    â€œAnother of they newspaper photographers, I shouldn’t wonder,” Mrs Penhallow said with a hint of smugness in her pleasant voice. “’Tisn’t allowed to take pictures of the Greenwitch, but there’s always one or two do try. The younger lads usually take care o’ them.”
    Jane thought the younger lads were probably taking good care of this year’s intruder, judging by the speed with which his threshing form was being hustled away. She looked again for Merriman, but he seemed to have disappeared. And a change in the voice of the crowd drew her eyes back to the end of Kemare Head.
    A voice called again, this time with familiar words of childhood. “One to be ready . . . two to be steady . . . three to be
off!”
Only the ropes at the rear and sides of the trolley were held now, Jane saw, by perhaps a dozen men each. At the last word of command the crowd buzzed and murmured, the lines of men ran forwards and sideways, Greenwitch lurching faster and faster before them; and then in one swift complex movement the trolley was jerked outwards over the edge of the cliff, and brought up short from falling by its ropes.
    And the great green tree-woven figure of the Greenwitch, with no rope to hold it back, was flung out into the air and down over the end of Kemare Head. For a split second it was there, visible, falling, in the blue and the green among the wheeling screaming white gulls, and then it was gone, plunging down, driven by the