it was impossible. Morally, it was in his eyes
just, and therefore probable; while as for testimony, men were content
with very little in those days, simply because they could get very
little. News progressed slowly in countries desolate and roadless, and
grew as it passed from mouth to mouth, as it did in the Highlands a
century ago, as it did but lately in the Indian Mutiny; till after a fact
had taken ten years in crossing a few mountains and forests, it had
assumed proportions utterly fantastic and gigantic.

So the wild king and his wild knights pause. They can face flesh and
blood: but who can face the quite infinite terrors of an unseen world?
They are men of blood too, men of evil lives; and conscience makes them
cowards. They begin to think that they have gone too far. Could they
see the saint, and make it up with him somewhat?

No. The saint they cannot see. To open his shrine would be to commit
the sin of Uzzah. Palsy and blindness would be the least that would
follow. But the dome under which he lies all men may see; and perhaps
the saint may listen, if they speak him fair.

They feel more and more uncomfortable. This saint, in heaven at God's
right hand, and yet there in the dom-church--is clearly a mysterious,
ubiquitous person, who may take them in the rear very unexpectedly. And
his priests, with their book-learning, and their sciences, and their
strange dresses and chants--who knows what secret powers, magical or
other, they may not possess?

They bluster at first: being (as I have said) much of the temper and
habits, for good and evil, of English navvies. But they grow more and
more uneasy, full of childish curiosity, and undefined dread. So into
the town they go, on promise (which they will honourably keep, being
German men) of doing no harm to the plebs, the half Roman artisans and
burghers who are keeping themselves alive here--the last dying remnants
of the civilization, and luxury, and cruelty, and wickedness, of a great
Roman colonial city; and they stare at arts and handicrafts new to them;
and are hospitably fed by bishops and priests; and then they go,
trembling and awkward, into the great dom-church; and gaze wondering at
the frescoes, and the carvings of the arcades--marbles from Italy,
porphyries from Egypt, all patched together out of the ruins of Roman
baths, and temples, and theatres; and at last they arrive at the saint's
shrine itself--some marble sarcophagus, most pro