. This was the
depopulated village of centuries ago. This was where the suicide lay;
and this was the place where I was alone--unmanned, shivering with
cold in a shroud of snow with a wild storm gathering again upon me! It
took all my philosophy, all the religion I had been taught, all my
courage, not to collapse in a paroxysm of fright.

And now a perfect tornado burst upon me. The ground shook as though
thousands of horses thundered across it; and this time the storm bore
on its icy wings, not snow, but great hailstones which drove with such
violence that they might have come from the thongs of Balearic
slingers--hailstones that beat down leaf and branch and made the
shelter of the cypresses of no more avail than though their stems were
standing-corn. At the first I had rushed to the nearest tree; but I
was soon fain to leave it and seek the only spot that seemed to afford
refuge, the deep Doric doorway of the marble tomb. There, crouching
against the massive bronze door, I gained a certain amount of
protection from the beating of the hailstones, for now they only drove
against me as they ricocheted from the ground and the side of the
marble.

As I leaned against the door, it moved slightly and opened inwards.
The shelter of even a tomb was welcome in that pitiless tempest, and I
was about to enter it when there came a flash of forked-lightning that
lit up the whole expanse of the heavens. In the instant, as I am a
living man, I saw, as my eyes were turned into the darkness of the
tomb, a beautiful woman, with rounded cheeks and red lips, seemingly
sleeping on a bier. As the thunder broke overhead, I was grasped as by
the hand of a giant and hurled out into the storm. The whole thing was
so sudden that, before I could realise the shock, moral as well as
physical, I found the hailstones beating me down. At the same time I
had a strange, dominating feeling that I was not alone. I looked
towards the tomb. Just then there came another blinding flash, which
seemed to strike the iron stake that surmounted the tomb and to pour
through to the earth, blasting and crumbling the marble, as in a burst
of flame. The dead woman rose for a moment of agony, while she was
lapped in the flame, and her bitter scream of pain was drowned in the
thundercrash. The last thing I heard was this mingling of dreadful
sound, as again I was seized in the giant-grasp and dragged away,
while the hailstones beat on me, and the air around seemed rev