So he left the old man's side and sturdily tramped away
into the huge dark of the room, resolutely explaining to himself
that this was all very natural; the old man had been ill, improperly
nourished, and the powerful stimulant of the wine had partly
restored him. But even while he went over it St. George knew in his
heart that what had happened was nothing that could be so explained,
nothing that could be explained at all by anything within his ken.
His footsteps echoed startlingly on the stones, and the chill breath
of the place smote his face as he moved. He stumbled on a displaced
tile and pitched forward upon a jagged corner of sarcophagus, and
reeled as if at a blow from some arm of the darkness. The taper rays
struck a length of wall before him, minting from the gloom a sheet
of pale orchids clinging to the unclean rock. St. George remembered
a green slope, spangled with crocuses and wild strawberries,
coloured like the orchids but lying under free sky, in free air. It
seemed only a trick of Chance that he was not now lying on that far
slope, wherever it was, instead of facing these ghost blooms in this
ghost place.
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