It didn't hurt, you know. It didn't hurt at all."

The yellow platform lights came into the field of view, passing first
rapidly, then slowly, and at last stopping with a jerk. Dim shapes of men
passed to and fro without.

"Euston!" cried a voice.

"Do you mean--?"

"There was no pain, no sting or smart. Amazement and then darkness
sweeping over everything. The hot, brutal face before me, the face of the
man who had killed me, seemed to recede. It swept out of existence--"

"Euston!" clamoured the voices outside; "Euston!"

The carriage door opened, admitting a flood of sound, and a porter stood
regarding us. The sounds of doors slamming, and the hoof-clatter of
cab-horses, and behind these things the featureless remote roar of the
London cobble-stones, came to my ears. A truck-load of lighted lamps
blazed along the platform.

"A darkness, a flood of darkness that opened and spread and blotted out
all things."

"Any luggage, sir?" said the porter.

"And that was the end?" I asked.

He seemed to hesitate. Then, almost inaudibly, he answered, "_No_."

"You mean?"

"I couldn't get to her. She was there on the other side of the temple--
And then--"

"Yes," I insisted. "Yes?"

"Nightmares," he cried; "nightmares indeed! My God! Great birds that
fought and tore."

XXVI.

THE VALLEY OF SPIDERS.

Towards mid-day the three pursuers came abruptly round a bend in the
torrent bed upon the sight of a very broad and spacious valley. The
difficult and winding trench of pebbles along which they had tracked the
fugitives for so long expanded to a broad slope, and with a common impulse
the three men left the trail, and rode to a little eminence set with
olive-dun trees, and there halted, the two others, as became them, a
little behind the man with the silver-studded bridle.

For a space they scanned the great expanse below them with eager eyes. It
spread remoter and remoter, with only a few clusters of sere thorn bushes
here and there, and the dim suggestions of some now waterless ravine to
break its desolation of yellow grass. Its purple distances melted at last
into the bluish slopes of the further hills--hills it might be of a
greener kind--and above them, invisibly supported, and seeming indeed to
hang in the blue, were the snow-clad summits of mountains--that grew
larger and bolder to the northwestward as the sides of the valley drew
together. And westward the valley opened until a distant darknes