of the novel, combining "God and the Devil". The Flood There are three important elements in the novel's concluding chapter. The significance of the flood; then Geard's suicide and grail vision; and finally the allusion to the Earth Mother, Cybele. There was an actual flood in the Somerset levels that surround Glastonbury in December 1929, just four months after Powys's visit, as well as one in 1919, when were inundated with sea water, poisoning the land for up to 7 years. Charles Lock describes water as a central element in A Glastonbury Romance, which "begins in one aquatic landscape, Norfolk, and moves to another, Glastonbury". Lock sees water as signifying both "salvation and destruction" and equates it "in the symbolic pattern of novel ... [with] the female principle of life". This flood has generally been interpreted allegorically, especially in terms of the Biblical Flood, but also in terms of the Waste Land story. John Brebner, Wilson Knight, and others see it as a cleansing force, with Geoffrey West describing "the flood 'sweeping away both capitalist and communist'". Morine Krissdottir, however, sees the flood making "the Waste Land ... fertile again". W. J. Keith rejects this, because "salt water distinct from fresh water is the reverse of 'life-giving'". A quite different perspective on the flood is provided by J. P. Couch, who questions the Biblical paradigm observing that the land is low lying and therefore vulnerable to flooding, including from the sea and "has at least once" in living memory "already merged with the sea". Furthermore, it is believed that, in earlier times, Glastonbury had been an island. Geard's suicide Geard asks John Crow if he could conceive him "committing suicide out of love of life". Indeed his "suicide is not undertaken in weariness of spirit but as a continuation of his quest", because he believes that, following his death, he will meet "'A living Being, who might, or might not, be the Christ the churches worshipped'". W. J. Keith and others, see Geard's death "not as an act of self-destruction but as a Merlininesque 'Esplumoir'" that is, as Owen describes it, "'a sort of inspired suicide, a mysterious dying in order to live more fully'"; a "mystic Fourth Dimension, or Nirvanic apotheosis". The last we learn is that as Geard is dying "In calm inviolable peace ... he saw ... that nameless Object, that fragment of the Absolute, about which