And in the background of these iterations, like a relic of an old order, the sun: intoxicated, spewing gas and sulphur, black with cordite smoke and tar. As the summer months draw on, it seems to sicken. Rising beneath him on early-morning flights, its light's infected by the ghostly pallor of the salient's mists, driven a nauseous hue by green and yellow flashes. It darkens, not lightens, as each day progresses and the puff-balls, vapour clouds and tracer-lines build up. Its transit through the air seems laboured, as though the whirring mechanism that dragged it along its tracks were damaged and worn out.