would
turn to see if her pursuer is gaining upon her, but some invincible
power restrains her.... Agony! Her feet catch in, and she falls over
great leaves. She falls into the clefts of ruined tombs, and her hands
as she attempts to rise are laid on sleeping snakes--rattlesnakes: they
turn to attack her, and they glide away and disappear in moss and
inscriptions. O, the calm horror of this region! Before her the trees
extend in complex colonnades, silent ruins are grown through with giant
roots, and about the mysterious entrances of the crypts there lingers
yet the odour of ancient sacrifices. The stem of a rare column rises
amid the branches, the fragment of an arch hangs over and is supported
by a dismantled tree trunk. Ages ago the leaves fell, and withered; ages
ago; and now the skeleton arms, lifted in fantastic frenzy against the
desert skies, are as weird and symbolic as the hieroglyphics on the
tombs below.

And through the torrid twilight of the approaching storm the cry of the
hyena is heard.

Flowers hang on every side,--flowers as strange and as gorgeous as
Byzantine chalices; flowers narrow and fluted and transparent as long
Venetian glasses; opaque flowers bulging and coloured with gold devices
like Chinese vases, flowers striped with cinnamon and veined with azure;
a million flower-cups and flower chalices, and in these as in censers
strange and deadly perfumes are melting, and the heavy fumes descend
upon the girl, and they mix with the polluting odour of the ancient
sacrifices. She sinks, her arms are raised like those of a victim; she
sinks overcome, done to death or worse in some horrible asphyxiation.

And through the torrid twilight of the approaching storm the cry of the
hyena is heard. His claws are upon the crumbling tombs.

The suffocating girl utters a thin wail. The vulture pauses, and is
stationary on the white and desert skies. She strives with her last
strength to free herself from the thrall of the great lianas, and she
falls into fresh meshes.... The claws are heard amid the ruins, there is
a hirsute smell; she turns with terrified eyes to plead, but she meets
only the dull liquorish eyes, and the breath of the obscene animal is on
her face.

Then she finds herself in the pleasure grounds of Thornby Place. There
are the evergreen oaks, there is the rosary flaring all its wealth of
red, purple, and white flowers, there is the park encircled by elms,
there is the vista filled in with