Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts: A Book of Stories

ance to the pastoral country around Sevenhays. We had left the beaten road for short turf-apparently of a copper-brown hue, but this may have been the effect of the moonlight. Th

Harry beside me took awa

down. But in time the air, hitherto so exhilarating, began to oppress my lungs

s noise of w

moment it occurred to me that this sound of water, distant

p of the arm that embraced the dim land

nos Okeanoio antyga par pymat

silent

the Eighteenth Book together in our study at Clifton; I at the table, Harry lolling in the cane-seated armchai

rim of which this unseen water echoed. And the resemblance grew more startling when, a mile or so farther on our way, as the grey daw

not unlike the Colosseum. A question shaped itself on my lips, but something in Harry's manner forbade it. His gaze was bent steadil

seemed, of plain worked stone, though I afterwards found it to be sculptured in low relief. The arches were cut in deep relief and backed with undressed stone. The lowest course of all, however, was quite plain, having neither arches nor frieze; but at intervals corresponding to the eight major points of the compass-so far as I who saw but one side of it could judge-pai

he long friezes in bas-relief represented men and women tortured and torturing with all conceivable variety of method and circumstance-flayed, racked, burned, torn asunder, loaded with weights, pinched with hot irons, and so on without end. And it added to the horror of these sculptures that while the limbs and even the dress of each figure were carved with elaborate care and nicety of detail, the faces of all-of those who applied the tor

d leave Grey Sultan at the entrance, he led me through the long archway or tunn

figures about the great archway yonder were diminished to the size of ants about a hole. . . For there were human figures busy in the arena, though not a soul sat in any of the granite tiers above. A million eyes had been less awful than those empty benches staring down in the cold dawn; bench after bench repeating the horror of the featurel

ed hill of which it was the apex; and from an open sluice immediately beneath the imperial throne a flood of water gushed with a force that carried it straight to this raised centre, over which it ran and rippled, and so drained back into the scuppers at the circumference. Before reaching the centre it broke and

zed, Harry stepped f

so?" I w

on, the fourth side, which faced the throne, lay open. And I saw-in the first cage, a man scourged with rods; in the second, a body twisted on the rack; in the third, a woman with a starving babe, and a fellow that held food to them and withdrew it quickly (the torturers wore masks on their faces, and whenever bloo

canopy. High over it the sun broke yellow on the climbing tiers of

bent h

here?" I flung out my hand towards the purple throne, and finding myself close to a fellow who sca

you," he said. "Th

fa

perished. His was the face of

-men and women-had but one face: the same wrung brow, the same wistful

God!" I fell on my knees in the

n and look!" sai

? He hides behi

he cur

es conti

sobs. Listen! Wh

e and about the floor.

lows hence down the hill, and

the eddies at my feet, for the

o suffering in the world but ultim

very gently led me away; but spoke again as we

ack: for a m

s beside it, and around, and away up to the sunlit crown of the amphitheatre, thronged with forms

h the archway. Grey Sul

the gate clash