No tribes lived here, though the swamp was rich and fecund enough that many came to gather and fish. And sometimes they died there, when the shifting ground ebbed suddenly from beneath their feet. It was said that the quicksands did not even let animal souls escape. True or not, enough had died there in their human shapes, smothering in the mud, that the swamp was crowded with ghosts. Priests travelled there to draw secrets from that buried mother-lode of the dead. On some nights even the least sensitive could see the lost souls drifting over the treacherous ground, glowing with pale fire. In the heart of the swamp there was a great island: no natural thing, it had been raised by the hands of men in an earlier age, earth set upon earth until they had conquered even the hunger of the swamp. Those ancients had raised a causeway towards it, a narrow processional path that was the only fixed and safe road through the quagmire. They had fetched the stones, the monoliths of bluish rock hewn from the mountains of the north.
