Nadine Gordimer meshes numerous cases of portending into "Quite a long time ago." The casing story presents the idea of dread. The possibility of the underground mining burrows that stone the storyteller's home—dull, imperceptible, and enigmatic—hint the ethnic turmoil that stones the social texture of the rural group in the sleep time story.
Because a is the first letter in the alphabet
A noun is a person place or thing!