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Far beyond adamantine city walls, barricades of mundane grey constructed haphazardly by drunken serfs and veined with capricious rivulets and awkward slants of a primitive mortar, beyond the barking butcher and his boasts of freshly hacked venison, the pleasant odors of the bakery on the corner as the furnace billows forth an unceasing stream of ashen cloud from the open door and the aroma of crisp, freshly-baked bread wafted gently by the breeze out into the market square where an unshaven man is reprimanded by his busybody wife due to his negligence in remembering to purchase fresh livestock from a passing caravan of traders before it absconds to the next village on the arduous path westward through the English highlands while a boy dressed in rags and covered with a layer of mud from a hog’s wallow and surrounded by the foul stench of manure plays gleefully by the well, yes far beyond the unchanging city and its callous walls of grey and far beyond the shepherd as he leads his flock of snowy-woolen sheep and the farmer as he harvests leafy cabbages to be passed along to the baron that he serves in order to consolidate the cost of living on owned land, far, far beyond the mundane life of the lowly serfs and foul-smelling peasants there lies a verdant hollow.

                The glen is blanketed with lush grass, each blade adorned with drops of morning dew that shimmer in the golden light of a rising sun. Scattered about the periphery of the emerald vale are tall elm trees, their leaves dancing in the gentle caress of a morning breeze that carries the sweet cadence of a nearby stream as lucid water flows atop smooth pebbles.