ing a look out for the stile
the doctor had mentioned. It would be a little of an adventure, he
thought, to find his way by an unknown track; he knew the direction in
which his home lay, and he imagined he would not have much difficulty in
crossing from one stile to another. The path led him up a steep bare
field, and when he was at the top, the town and the valley winding up to
the north stretched before him. The river was stilled at the flood, and
the yellow water, reflecting the sunset, glowed in its deep pools like
dull brass. These burning pools, the level meadows fringed with
shuddering reeds, the long dark sweep of the forest on the hill, were all
clear and distinct, yet the light seemed to have clothed them with a new
garment, even as voices from the streets of Caermaen sounded strangely,
mounting up thin with the smoke. There beneath him lay the huddled
cluster of Caermaen, the ragged and uneven roofs that marked the winding
and sordid streets, here and there a pointed gable rising above its
meaner fellows; beyond he recognized the piled mounds that marked the
circle of the amphitheatre, and the dark edge of trees that grew where
the Roman wall whitened and waxed old beneath the frosts and rains of
eighteen hundred years. Thin and strange, mingled together, the voices
came up to him on the hill; it was as if an outland race inhabited the
ruined city and talked in a strange language of strange and terrible
things. The sun had slid down the sky, and hung quivering over the huge
dark dome of the mountain like a burnt sacrifice, and then suddenly
vanished. In the afterglow the clouds began to writhe and turn scarlet,
and shone so strangely reflected in the pools of the snake-like river,
that one would have said the still waters stirred, the fleeting and
changing of the clouds seeming to quicken the stream, as if it bubbled
and sent up gouts of blood. But already about the town the darkness was
forming; fast, fast the shadows crept upon it from the forest, and from
all sides banks and wreaths of curling mist were gathering, as if a
ghostly leaguer were being built up against the city, and the strange
race who lived in its streets. Suddenly there burst out from the
stillness the clear and piercing music of the _reveille_, calling,
recalling, iterated, reiterated, and ending with one long high fierce
shrill note with which the steep hills rang. Perhaps a boy in the school
band was practicing on his bugle, but for Lucian