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helmet, and carrying his sword. And before the sun had risen clear of the rim of the hills he and Hrothgar, with a mingled company of Danes and Geats behind them, were pressing onward across the waste wet mosses of the moors, following Grendel’s blood trail towards the seashore.
    Far down the coast from the fjord with its shingle strand where the Geatish war-galley lay behind her barricade of oars, was a very different place; a sea-inlet between two steep nesses, with a narrow opening to the sea outside. Along the base of the cliffs lay black shelving rocks where the sea beasts basked at noontide, and others that were jagged and fanged like sea beasts themselves, and the waves of the open sea, driven into the confined space, boiled and weltered as in a cauldron. At the landward end of this evil place a stream coming down from the high moors had cut for itself through the years a deep gorge overhung with a tangle of sere and salt-burned trees that dripped grey lichen into the grey mists of the falling water and the spume that beat up from the churning waves below. A place of ill-omen; a dreadful place of which men told many stories—stories of giant shapes half glimpsed in the sea mists, of strange sounds echoing and strange lights flaring beneath the water, and storms that blew up out of nowhere and strange tides that set there, while elsewhere along the coast the winds and the tides were fair. Land animals shunned the place, they said, and if a deer hard-pressed by the hounds were driven to the edge of the stream it would turn there on the bank and die, rather than plunge into the water and swim for safety.

    To this place Grendel’s blood trail led the Geatish and Danish warriors, and on the cliff edge above it, lying abandoned like some fragment of a mouse that a great cat has dropped from its jaws, they found Aschere’s head, where Grendel’s Dam had torn it off before she plunged down to her lair.
    Dismounting, the thanes gathered about it in silence. Hrothgar in their midst knelt stiffly beside the last dreadful relic of his dead sword-brother, and put back the tangle of blood-soaked hair with hands as gentle as a woman’s; but he spoke no word—there was no word to speak. In a short while he rose, saying to the thanes about him, ‘Hobble the horses; from here we must go on foot.’
    One by one, following the old King and the young hero, they dropped over the edge out of the morning sunlight, and began the long climb down through the rocks and tree roots of the dark gorge to the foot of the cliffs. As they went, it seemed to every man that a cold murk, a shadow that was more than the headlands cutting off the light of day, rose about them, deadening heart and spirit; a shadow that grew chiller and more deadly with every downward step they took.
    At last the gorge widened, the stream sprang out over a ledge and plunged down to join the churning waters of the sea-hole, and following it they came scrambling out from a world of trees into a world of spray-lashed rocks. On the rock ledges the great tusked seals and walruses lay basking, another menace to be outfaced; and all among the rocks the water was fouled with murky crimson as slow gouts of blood still came welling up from below. The roar of the water was in their ears, but under the roar, like the still depths far down beneath the fret and turmoil of the surface waves, was a great silence. No sea birds cried in this place, and the silence, like the shadow, pressed upon the heart.
    One of the Danes had brought a war-horn with him, and in a gesture of defiance he put the silver mouthpiece to his lips and set the dim gorge and the gloom beneath the trees echoing with the eager battle-music. The echoes flung back and forth along the base of the cliffs, splintering on the sheer rock faces, and the sea beasts, roused from their sleep, plunged roaring and bellowing into the water.
    Beowulf snatched a bow from the Geat who stood nearest to