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I felt a tiny puff of air, as if stirred by an insect’s wings, and there was an arrow between his feet. Right between his feet, an arrow, out of nowhere. Then it was as if he had seen the most awful thing he could imagine. I have never seen such a look of shock and horror ever before. I have never seen anyone run as fast as he ran away, shrieking and screaming and wailing.
    I looked behind me and still I cannot quite believe, dear diary, what I saw. Standing there was a fair-haired man with a small harp. He had little rags tied all over him—in his hair, in his beard, to his clothes, to his arms, his legs, his toes, his fingers. Even his little harp had coloured rags tied to the tops of its strings. He was blind—I could see that at once. He had no eyes. He had never had eyes. Where eyes should have been, there was smooth skin growing over empty sockets.
    Beside him was a red-haired woman dressed in a sort of harness made out of leather straps. She carried a huge bow as tall as she was, which was not very tall, smaller even than I am, and the wood of that bow was marvellously painted with spirals and twisted, twining animals. At her waist she wore a quiver of arrows.
    I stared so long, diary—I just could not believe what I was seeing. Then, without a word, the blind man and the woman turned and walked away, back out of the bower, up into the woods, and I heard the song of the ragman’s harp drifting on the still evening air.
    As I have written, it all seems now like a dream, or a nightmare. I just don’t know which is more disturbing—if it was real, or if it was a dream?

Dr. Edward Garret Desmond’s Personal Diary: May 28, 1913
    W ORK IS PROCEEDING APACE on the signalling device. The labourers are addressing themselves to their tasks with an enthusiasm I would like to attribute to a desire to communicate with higher intelligences but I think is rather due to Lord Fitzgerald’s generous purse; the little I have managed to scrape together from the estate is paltry in the extreme compared to the Clarenorris fortunes.
    Already the first pontoon sections have been floated into Sligo Harbour and the lanterns tested and found to operate satisfactorily. Such successes are heartening after the delays and confusions of the early weeks. The plan is to assemble the cross from 170 pontoon sections, each one hundred yards long. This sounds a daunting proposition, given the sober truth that astronomical mechanics wait for no man, but the sections have been largely preassembled in the town boat yards and only remain to be floated and bolted into their finished form. Observing the great legion of labourers (of which there are no shortage in this poverty-blighted county), I have no fear that Project Pharos will not be completed by the time the extrasolar vehicle attains perigee. My outstanding concern—that of devising a universally comprehensible mode of communication with which to converse with the Altairii—has recently been resolved to my complete satisfaction. It is a universal truth that the laws of mathematics are the same upon the worlds of Altair as they are upon this one; to wit, the ratio of the circle’s radius to its circumference, which we call pi, must be as familiar to the Altairii as to us. Therefore I have designed an electrical relay whereby one arm of the cross will flash its lights twenty-two times for the other’s seven, this being the approximate fractional ratio of pi. Such a signal cannot fail to attract the attention of our stellanauts and pave the way for more intimate conversation, a code for which I am currently devising using primes and exponents.
May 31, 1913
    Craigdarragh
    Drumcliffe
    County Sligo
    My Dearest Constance,
    Just a brief note to express my thanks for your generous invitation to the boating party at Rathkennedy. Of course I shall be there. Few things are more delightful to me than an afternoon on Lough Gill aboard Grania, and, coupled with a reading by Mr. Yeats, you temptress, how