This year's crop is almost ready

Soon the air in the garden will be full once more with opium smoke as the poets lie in their perfumed bowers, babbling strange prophesies to the attentive scribes.

Few survive beyond early adulthood. They sacrifice their health and their lives that the prophecy may be told: that we may know what terror waits in the the winter darkness to come, that we may be prepared to defend ourselves once more from what may break through from outside.