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 CHAPTER XVI

SEEDS

afternoon, a little before the last of the daylight died, Chun was seated alone at a spot just without the main portals of the upper temple. To the right and left of him, the narrow abutting platform flanked the massive walls, and spread away to the angles of the building, where other porches projected, crowned high overhead by their tremendous domes. At his feet, far below, and already plunged in shadow, lay the courtyard, with its twin guard- houses indistinctly seen. Beyond the huddle of roofs on its further side, which formed Chun's immediate foreground, and the long, distant line of the exterior cloisters, the forest—pitch-black in the dusk—rose in sombre, broken wave-crests against the sullen reds and purples of the sunset. On the horizon to the north-west, the waters of the Great Lake were visible, glinting with a dull and ruddy sheen as they faintly reflected the glow in the sky.

Chun was deep in thought; but remotely he was conscious of an insistent, half-heard com- motion within the dark recesses of the Wat.