ith a jerk under that forbidding gateway and
glared at its tumbled masonry and great portals hanging rotten at their
hinges, suddenly the truth flashed upon me. I had taken the forbidden
road after all. I was in the ancient, ghost-haunted city of Queen Yang!

CHAPTER XV

The dark forest seemed to shut behind as I entered the gateway of the
deserted Hither town, against which my wood-cutter friend had warned
me, while inside the soft mist hung in the starlight like grey drapery
over endless vistas of ruins. What was I to do? Without all was black
and cheerless, inside there was at least shelter. Wet and cold, my
courage was not to be put down by the stories of a silly savage; I
would go on whatever happened. Besides, the soft sound of crying, now
apparently all about, seemed companionable, and I had heard so much of
ghosts of late, the sharp edge of fear at their presence was wearing
off.

So in I went: up a broad, decayed street, its flagstones heaved
everywhere by the roots of gnarled trees, and finding nothing save
ruin, tried to rest under a wall. But the night air was chilly and the
shelter poor, so out I came again, with the wailing in the shadows so
close about now that I stopped, and mustering up courage called aloud:

"Hullo, you who weep there in the dark, are you living or dead?" And
after a minute from the hollows of the empty hearths around came the
sad little responsive echo:

"Are you living or dead?" It was very delusive and unsatisfactory, and
I was wondering what to do next when a slant of warmer wind came up
behind me under the mist, and immediately little tongues of blue flame
blossomed without visible cause in every darksome crevice; pale
flickers of miasmic light rising pallid from every lurking nook and
corner in the black desolation as though a thousand lamps were lit by
unseen fingers, and, knee high, floated out into the thoroughfare where
they oscillated gently in airy grace, and then, forming into
procession, began drifting before the tepid air towards the city
centre. At once I thought of what the woodcutter had seen, but was too
wet and sulky by this time to care. The fascination of the place was on
me, and dropping into rear of the march, I went forward with it. By
this time the wailing had stopped, though now and then it seemed a dark
form moved in the empty doorways on either hand, while the mist,
parting into gossamers before the wind, took marvellously human forms
in