window
with the angel. The little Latin priest explored and admired everything
exhaustively, talking cheerfully but in a low voice all the time.
When in the course of his investigation he found the side exit and the
winding stair down which Wilfred had rushed to find his brother dead,
Father Brown ran not down but up, with the agility of a monkey, and his
clear voice came from an outer platform above.

"Come up here, Mr. Bohun," he called. "The air will do you good."

Bohun followed him, and came out on a kind of stone gallery or balcony
outside the building, from which one could see the illimitable plain
in which their small hill stood, wooded away to the purple horizon
and dotted with villages and farms. Clear and square, but quite small
beneath them, was the blacksmith's yard, where the inspector still stood
taking notes and the corpse still lay like a smashed fly.

"Might be the map of the world, mightn't it?" said Father Brown.

"Yes," said Bohun very gravely, and nodded his head.

Immediately beneath and about them the lines of the Gothic building
plunged outwards into the void with a sickening swiftness akin to
suicide. There is that element of Titan energy in the architecture of
the Middle Ages that, from whatever aspect it be seen, it always seems
to be rushing away, like the strong back of some maddened horse. This
church was hewn out of ancient and silent stone, bearded with old
fungoids and stained with the nests of birds. And yet, when they saw it
from below, it sprang like a fountain at the stars; and when they saw
it, as now, from above, it poured like a cataract into a voiceless pit.
For these two men on the tower were left alone with the most terrible
aspect of Gothic; the monstrous foreshortening and disproportion, the
dizzy perspectives, the glimpses of great things small and small things
great; a topsy-turvydom of stone in the mid-air. Details of stone,
enormous by their proximity, were relieved against a pattern of fields
and farms, pygmy in their distance. A carved bird or beast at a corner
seemed like some vast walking or flying dragon wasting the pastures and
villages below. The whole atmosphere was dizzy and dangerous, as if men
were upheld in air amid the gyrating wings of colossal genii; and the
whole of that old church, as tall and rich as a cathedral, seemed to sit
upon the sunlit country like a cloudburst.

"I think there is something rather dangerous about standing on these
high plac