Rain, Wind, Sunlight And The Old Immortal Dark

(I would like to find a truly memorable title for every single post.)

I am starting to reread Poul Anderson's The Peregrine/Star Ways in order either to confirm or to disconfirm my impression that Trevelyan Mich expected other Coordinators to follow his lead by leaving the Service to join the Nomads.

Meanwhile, I have come across the following passage:

"The Captain's Hall stood near the edge of a bluff. More than two centuries ago, when the Nomads found Rendezvous and chose it for their meeting place, they had raised the Hall. Two hundred years of rain, wind, and sunlight had fled; and still the Hall was there. It might be standing when all the Nomads were gone into darkness.
"Man was a small and hurried thing; his spaceships spanned the light-years, and his feverish death-driven energy made the skies of a thousand worlds clangorous with his works - but the old immortal dark reached farther than he could imagine."
-Poul Anderson, The Peregrine (New York, 1979), CHAPTER II, p. 6.

Observations:

we saw the Nomads founded and now we see their Rendezvous;
Traveler Thorkild has called the meeting;
not every human culture is hurried or feverish;
this "immortal dark" is not the interstellar darkness;
it is, in part, the "old and protean enemy" that haunts this future history series;
but, most fundamentally, it is mortality;
appropriately, we approach the end of the series.