They were level with the
arena. In the arena were crosses; from them drooped bleeding figures. On
the sand beasts prowled, bodies lay. They saw it all through bars. They
seemed to be in the place where the chosen victims waited their turn,
waited for the lions and the crosses, the palm and the crown. Close by
Edward was a group--an old man, a woman--children. He could have touched
them with his hand. The woman and the man stared in an agony of terror
straight in the eyes of a snarling tiger, ten feet long, that stood up
on its hind feet and clawed through the bars at them. The youngest
child, only, unconscious of the horror, laughed in the very face of it.
Roman soldiers, unmoved in military vigilance, guarded the group of
martyrs. In a low cage to the left more wild beasts cringed and seemed
to growl, unfed. Within the grating on the wide circle of yellow sand
lions and tigers drank the blood of Christians. Close against the bars a
great lion sucked the chest of a corpse on whose blood-stained face the
horror of the death-agony was printed plain.

"Good God!" said Edward. Vincent took his arm suddenly, and he started
with what was almost a shriek.

"What a nervous chap you are!" said Vincent complacently, as they
regained the street where the lights were, and the sound of voices and
the movement of live human beings--all that warms and awakens nerves
almost paralysed by the life in death of waxen immobility.

"I don't know," said Edward. "Let's have a vermouth, shall we? There's
something uncanny about those wax things. They're like life--but they're
much more like death. Suppose they moved? I don't feel at all sure that
they don't move, when the lights are all out, and there's no one there."
He laughed. "I suppose you were never frightened, Vincent?"

"Yes, I was once," said Vincent, sipping his absinthe. "Three other men
and I were taking turns by twos to watch a dead man. It was a fancy of
his mother's. Our time was up, and the other watch hadn't come. So my
chap--the one who was watching with me, I mean--went to fetch them. I
didn't think I should mind. But it was just like you say."

"How?"

"Why, I kept thinking: suppose it should move--it was so like life. And
if it did move, of course it would have been because it _was_ alive,
and I ought to have been glad, because the man was my friend. But all
the same, if it had moved I should have gone mad."

"Yes," said Edward; "that's just exactly it."

Vincent