n thousand monks. But you will see
when we look in.

"The court we are now in is surrounded by cloisters. There are
just nine thousand cells; there are, perhaps, fifty unoccupied
now. Each cell, as you know, is a little house in itself, with
three or four rooms and a garden; so we need space. The
cemeteries are beyond the cloisters. We bury, as you know, in the
bare earth without a coffin."

It was like the creation of a dream, thought the priest as he
walked with his guide, listening to the quiet talk. He had seen
some of these facts in the book that Father Jervis had lent him;
but they had meant little to him. Now he began to understand, and
once more a kind of inexplicable terror began to affect him.

But as, five minutes later, he stood in the high western gallery
of the church, and saw that enormous place stretching beyond
calculation to where thin clear glass sanctuary windows rose in
a group, like sword-blades, above the white pavement before the
altar; as he saw the ranks of stalls running up, tier above
tier, and understood that, all told, they numbered ten thousand,
one third of them on this side of the screen, in the lay
brothers' choir, and two thirds beyond; as he imagined what it
must be to watch this congregation of elect souls stream in,
each with his lantern in his hand, through the countless doors
that ended each little narrow gangway that disappeared among the
stalls; as he pictured the thunder of the unemotional Carthusian
plain-song--as he saw all this with his bodily eyes standing
silent beside the silent monk, and began little by little to
take in what it all meant, and what this world must be in which
such a condition of things was accepted--a world where
Contemplatives at last were honoured as the kings of the earth,
and themselves controlled and soothed the lives of whom the
world had despaired; as his imagination ran out still farther,
and he remembered that this was but one of innumerable houses of
the kind--as he began to be aware of all this, and of what it
signified as regards the civilization in which he found
himself--his terror began to pass, and to give place to an awe,
and to a kind of exaltation, such as neither Rome nor Lourdes
nor London had been able even to suggest. . . .

(VIII)

"Well?" said Father Jervis, smiling, as the two met on the
platform that evening, to wait for the English-bound air-ship.

Monsignor looked at him.

"I am glad I came," he said. "No; it