minute lateen-sails, and the
grayish town beneath him, so old and yet so vital, and the calm harbor,
with the forest of spars, and Monte Cristo, white as an egg....

A queer town that, as familiar as a channel marking, teeming as an
ant-hill, and when darkness came over it, and he viewed it from the
after deck, mystery came, too.... For a while there was a hush, and
around the hills gigantic ghosts walked.... One thought of the Phocaeans
who had founded it, and to whom the Cannebiere was a rope-walk, where
they made the sheets for their ships.... And one thought of Lazarus, who
had been raised from among the silent dead and who had come there, so
legend read, a gray figure in ceramic garments, standing in the prow of
a boat....

One thing Robin More had told him remained in his mind and captured his
fancy, and that was that Pontius Pilate had been governor of Marseilles
after his office in Judea. And of him Shane would think when the
mysterious dusk came on the Midi hills ... Pilate, who had smiled, "What
is truth?" and who had turned Christ over to the mob.... A big man, he
imagined the Roman to have been, with clever eyes, and a great black
beard covering a weak chin.... A man who knew all the subtleties of
mind, and had no backbone.... And he could see the Roman, sitting on his
villa porch in the dusk with tortured eyes, and fingering his beard with
fingers that shook.... Paul was going through Greece and Rome like a
flame, and the Pilate wondered.... Could it have been possible?...
Ridiculous! a Jewish carpenter! A crazy man!.... And yet.... Could it
have been possible.... No! no! no! And yet.... People had seen Him walk
on the waves.... But people never knew what they saw, exactly.... No!
How foolish!... He raised a man from the dead they said.... And that
centurion--what was his name?--his daughter!... No, a stupid Jewish
legend.... And yet.... Could it be possible? Could it? Could it?

"Lights! Lights! Do you hear me! Bring lights! Lights!" Pilate would all
but scream, panic-stricken in the Midi dusk....

To Shane Campbell Marseilles had been all this for two years while he
journeyed from Liverpool for silk and scented soaps--a landmark
familiar as the Giant's Causeway, a strange, motley human circus, a veil
behind which hid gigantic ghosts.... Until he met _La Mielleuse_ on the
road to Aix.

Section 2

For six years now, since the day they had buried his wife in the green
divots of Louth, women had bee