Kif: An Unvarnished History

The boy stepped into the chill dark of the winter morning and closed the
door quietly behind him. Quietly because the wife of Farmer Vass was apt
to be unreasonable if she were wakened betimes. It lacked an hour till
dawn and there was neither earth nor sky, hedge nor horizon. Only the
all-enveloping dark, immediate, almost tangible--the blackness that hems
us in with ourselves and annihilates philosophy. And it was bitterly
cold. The boy clutched at his coat collar as the thin sterile air struck
...