Covenant being as alone in the Land as he is on our Earth is at first an extremely depressing picture for me to imagine, especially following chapters which contain Lena's murder and Trell's despair. However, I start to feel an odd comfort once TC gets enfolded in the warm embrace of Morinmoss Forest.
As he wended through the marge of the forest, he felt an unexpected dimunition of the cold. Daylight was dying out of the ashen sky behind him and ahead lay nothing but the brooding bloom of the forest depths. Yet the winter seemed to ease rather than sharpen with the coming of night. Shambling onward, he soon discovered that the snow thinned as he moved deeper among the trees. In a few places, he even saw living leaves. They clung grimly to the branches, and the trees in turn clung to each other, interwove their branches and leaned on each other's shoulders like staunch, broad, black-wounded comrades holding themselves erect together. Through the thinning snow, animal tracks made light whorls that dizzied him when he tried to follow them. And the air grew warmer.
Gradually, a dim light spread around him. For a time, he did not notice it to wonder what it was; he walked like a ruin along the alien spangle, and did not see the pale ghost-light expanding. But than a wet strand of moss struck his face, and he jerked into awareness of his surroundings.
The tree trunks were glowing faintly, like moonlight mystically translated out of the blind sky into the forest. They huddled around him in stands and stretches and avenues of gossamer illumination; they were poised on all sides like white eyes, watching him. And through their branches hung draped, dangled curtains and hawsers of moist black moss.
Then in his madness, fear came upon him like a shout of ancient forestial rage, springing from the unavenged slaughter of the trees; and he turned to flee. Wailing lornly, he slapped the moss away from him and tried to run. But his ankle buckled under him at every stride. And the music held him. Its former allure became a command, swinging him against his will so that his panic itself, his very flight, drove him deeper among the trees and the moss and the light. He had lost all possession of himself. The strength of the grass capered in him like poison; the gleams danced through their blue-green intervals, guiding him. He fled like the hunted, battering and recoiling against trunks, tangling himself in moss, tearing his hair in fear. Animals scampered out of his wailing path, and his ears echoed to the desolate cries of owls.
He was soon exhausted. His flesh could not bear any more. As his wailing turned to frenzy in his throat, a large hairy moth the size of a cormorant suddenly fluttered out of the branches, veered erratically, and crashed into him. The impact knocked him to the ground in a pile of useless limbs. For a moment, he thrashed weakly. But he could not regain his breath, steady himself, rise. After a brief struggle, he collapsed on the warm turf and abandoned himself to the forest.
Thomas Covenant getting knocked over by a moth, albeit a large moth, strikes me as kind of funny (you wouldn't think even a
large moth would have much weight to it, would you?).
Anyway, re-reading this made me think the moth was deliberately sent to intercept him.
