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In the shadow of the Marble Cliffs, the Narrator and Brother Otho lead a near idyllic life as dedicated botanists, spicing frugality with spasmodic carnival. Then the Foresters of the Campagne take to roaming with incendiary torches in murderous midnight bands. Soon, time-honoured rituals are being turned to baser ends... even in the towns of the Great Marina, once famous for their now discredited poets and philosophers. In time, a miasma of evil blankets the country and at last even the botanists are drawn towards the final appalling holocaust. Like Kafka's novels, Ernst Juenger's allegory is indeterminate as to time and place. First published in Germany in 1939, it can be read as a general study of tyranny... or as an astonishingly prescient parable on the rise and fall of Nazism.