The Ball and the Cross eBook

unexpected window would give them a nameless hint of the hundred human secrets which they left behind them with their dust.  Sometimes even a slouching rustic would be afoot on the road and would look after them, as after a flying phantom.  But still MacIan stood up staring at earth and heaven; and still the door he had flung open flapped loose like a flag.  Turnbull, after a few minutes of dumb amazement, had yielded to the healthiest element in his nature and gone off into uncontrollable fits of laughter.  The girl had not stirred an inch.

After another half mile that seemed a mere flash, Turnbull leant over and locked the door.  Evan staggered at last into his seat and hid his throbbing head in his hands; and still the car flew on and its driver sat inflexible and silent.  The moon had already gone down, and the whole darkness was faintly troubled with twilight and the first movement of beasts and fowls.  It was that mysterious moment when light is coming as if it were something unknown whose nature one could not guess—­a mere alteration in everything.  They looked at the sky and it seemed as dark as ever; then they saw the black shape of a tower or tree against it and knew that it was already grey.  Save that they were driving southward and had certainly passed the longitude of London, they knew nothing of their direction; but Turnbull, who had spent a year on the Hampshire coast in his youth, began to recognize the unmistakable but quite indescribable villages of the English south.  Then a white witch fire began to burn between the black stems of the fir-trees; and, like so many things in nature, though not in books on evolution, the daybreak, when it did come, came much quicker than one would think.  The gloomy heavens were ripped up and rolled away like a scroll, revealing splendours, as the car went roaring up the curve of a great hill; and above them and black against the broadening light, there stood one of those crouching and fantastic trees that are first signals of the sea.

X.

THE SWORDS REJOINED

As they came over the hill and down on the other side of it, it is not too much to say that the whole universe of God opened over them and under them, like a thing unfolding to five times its size.  Almost under their feet opened the enormous sea, at the bottom of a steep valley which fell down into a bay; and the sea under their feet blazed at them almost as lustrous and almost as empty as the sky.  The sunrise opened above them like some cosmic explosion, shining and shattering and yet silent; as if the world were blown to pieces without a sound.  Round the rays of the victorious sun swept a sort of rainbow of confused and conquered colours—­brown and blue and green and flaming rose-colour; as though gold were driving before it all the colours of the world.  The lines of the landscape down which they sped, were the simple, strict, yet swerving, lines of a rushing river; so that it was almost as if they were being sucked down in a huge still whirlpool.  Turnbull had some such feeling, for he spoke for the first time for many hours.