Dawn comes late to the Scimitar in the hour before the gap-sky wakes, for the western ridge stands between the falls and the turning of the light, and the mist lies thick along the stone. Yet before the light there is always a paling, and the paling came now: a grey that lifted without a sun, first in the high air and afterwards in the water; and the water at that hour is black, and only by the faint fall of the upper sky can the traveller see that it is moving.

She had come up the west path an hour before the paling. She knew the path. It climbed under alder and birch whose names she had been taught by those who had taught her to walk it, and the names were the names of Earth though the trees were not quite the trees of Earth, and she had long ago ceased to find this strange. When she walked the path in darkness, she walked by the sound of the water, and the water could be heard at great distance, for the mist carried it. She walked, and the mist grew heavy upon her coat.

At the flat stone above the basin she sat. She did not look upward at first. It is the way of those who come here to let the light come, and not to watch for it. When at length the paling began to be a brightness — when, far off along the spin, the emitters of the gap-sky kindled the first of the morning and the light moved as light moves in this place, a slow line drawn westward across the eighty kilometres overhead — then she looked up.

The falls were lit. The arc of the falling water, which is the arc that the turning writes and that no one in the cylinder has ever seen drawn straight, brightened from the lip downward, and the mist took the light. The birds were already above. She had known that they would be. They are always the first.