and more time he spent in his torpor, unaware of what was day-dream
and what was sleep-dream in the content of his unconsciousness.
And here, in the unforgetable crypts of man's unwritten history,
unthinkable and unrealizable, like passages of nightmare or
impossible adventures of lunacy, he encountered the monsters
created of man's first morality that ever since have vexed him into
the spinning of fantasies to elude them or do battle with them.

In short, weighted by his seventy years, in the vast and silent
loneliness of the North, Old Tarwater, as in the delirium of drug
or anaesthetic, recovered within himself, the infantile mind of the
child-man of the early world. It was in the dusk of Death's
fluttery wings that Tarwater thus crouched, and, like his remote
forebear, the child-man, went to myth-making, and sun-heroizing,
himself hero-maker and the hero in quest of the immemorable
treasure difficult of attainment.

Either must he attain the treasure--for so ran the inexorable logic
of the shadow-land of the unconscious--or else sink into the all-
devouring sea, the blackness eater of the light that swallowed to
extinction the sun each night . . . the sun that arose ever in
rebirth next morning in the east, and that had become to man man's
first symbol of immortality through rebirth. All this, in the
deeps of his unconsciousness (the shadowy western land of
descending light), was the near dusk of Death down into which he
slowly ebbed.

But how to escape this monster of the dark that from within him
slowly swallowed him? Too deep-sunk was he to dream of escape or
feel the prod of desire to escape. For him reality had ceased.