Page:Tales of the Unexpected (1924).djvu/171

 passing of time. I turned on him with a brutal question with the tone of 'Now or never.'

'And did you dream again?'

'Yes.'

He seemed to force himself to finish. His voice was very low.

'Once more, and as it were only for a few instants. I seemed to have suddenly awakened out of a great apathy, to have risen into a sitting position, and the body lay there on the stones beside me. A gaunt body. Not her, you know. So soon—it was not her. . ..

'I may have heard voices. I do not know. Only I knew clearly that men were coming into the solitude and that that was a last outrage.

'I stood up and walked through the temple, and there came into sight—first one man with a yellow face. dressed in a uniform of dirty white, trimmed with blue, and then several, climbing to the crest of the old wall of the vanished city, and crouching there. They were little bright figures in the sunlight, and there they hung, weapon in hand, peering cautiously before them.

'And further away I saw others, and then more at another point in the wall. It was a long lax line of men in open order.

'Presently the man I had first seen stood up and shouted a command, and his men came tumbling down the wall and into the high weeds towards the temple. He scrambled down with them and led them. He came facing towards me, and when he saw me he stopped.

'At first I had watched these men with a mere curiosity, but when I had seen they meant to come to the temple I was moved to forbid them. I shouted to the officer.

'"You must not come here," I cried, "I am here, I am here with my dead."