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288 As poetry is emotion remembered in tranquillity, as a painter often prefers to paint a great canvas from studies and memory — quiet in his studio — rather than from the actual but too kinetic scene, so Hands as he read the news-sheets felt and lived the story they had to tell far more acutely than in London.

He had more time to think about what he read It was in this lost comer of the world that the chill began to creep over him. The furious sounds of Nature clamoured in his ears, assaulting them like strongholds; these were the objective sounds.

But as his subjective brain grew clear the words his eyes conveyed to it filled it with a more awful reverberation.

The awful weight grew. He began to realise with terrible distinctness the consequences of his discovery. They stunned him. A carved inscription, a crumbling tomb in half an acre of waste ground. He had stumbled upon so much and little more. He, Cyril Hands, had found this.

His straining eyes day by day turned to the columns of the papers.