_paso_, like a huge
golden car. Christ was nailed to a cross not yet lifted into place. A
Roman soldier, of exaggerated height and sardonic features, stood reading
the parchment with the mocking inscription about to be nailed above the
thorn-crowned head. His evil mouth was curled in a satirical smile. Two
centurions in armour sat their impatient horses, and gave directions for
raising the cross. The effect was startling; for in this pale beginning of
light, and the atmosphere of tingling exaltation which steeped the town,
it was difficult not to believe that the terrible carved figures of wood
had life, and that with the eyes of one's flesh one beheld the world's
great tragedy.

Somehow the impression of horror was but deepened by the fact that the
bearers had come out from under the curtains of the _paso_, to take off
the large pads they wore on their heads, to drink water, and smoke
cigarettes with the penitents who had rolled up the masks from their pale,
damp faces. They might have been comrades of the Roman soldiers, in their
obliviousness of that tortured form on the cross.

It was not yet five o'clock when Dick and I plunged into the cool gloom of
the cathedral, passing the spot where Carmona had struck at me, and the
chapel where I had taken Monica. The stones were slippery as the floor of
a ballroom, with wax dropped from innumerable candles, and the air was
heavy with the smoke of stale incense.

The searchlight of dawn could scarcely penetrate the black curtains which
throughout Holy Week had draped the cathedral; therefore a solitary beam,
like a bar of gold, slanted in through one superb window.

The amethysts, emeralds, and rubies of incomparable painted glass
transformed the yellow bar into a rainbow which streamed down the length
of the majestic aisle and struck full upon a golden altar. Then slowly the
jewelled band moved from the gold carvings, the flames dying as it passed.
Travelling, still like a searchlight, it found the prostrate forms of
sleeping men exhausted by their vigils, snatched out of veiling darkness
kneeling women clad in black, and at last rested on the Holy Week monument
itself, paled its myriad candles, and made pools of liquid gold on the
vestments of priests who had knelt all night in adoration of the Host.

"Say," said Dick, half whispering, "I don't gush as a rule; but doesn't it
look like the light of salvation coming to save lost souls?"

Not a hotel in Seville had shut