everything. They looked at the sky and it seemed as dark
as ever; then they saw the black shape of a tower or tree against it and
knew that it was already grey. Save that they were driving southward and
had certainly passed the longitude of London, they knew nothing of their
direction; but Turnbull, who had spent a year on the Hampshire coast in
his youth, began to recognize the unmistakable but quite indescribable
villages of the English south. Then a white witch fire began to burn
between the black stems of the fir-trees; and, like so many things in
nature, though not in books on evolution, the daybreak, when it did
come, came much quicker than one would think. The gloomy heavens were
ripped up and rolled away like a scroll, revealing splendours, as the
car went roaring up the curve of a great hill; and above them and black
against the broadening light, there stood one of those crouching and
fantastic trees that are first signals of the sea.

X. THE SWORDS REJOINED

As they came over the hill and down on the other side of it, it is not
too much to say that the whole universe of God opened over them and
under them, like a thing unfolding to five times its size. Almost under
their feet opened the enormous sea, at the bottom of a steep valley
which fell down into a bay; and the sea under their feet blazed at them
almost as lustrous and almost as empty as the sky. The sunrise opened
above them like some cosmic explosion, shining and shattering and yet
silent; as if the world were blown to pieces without a sound. Round
the rays of the victorious sun swept a sort of rainbow of confused and
conquered colours--brown and blue and green and flaming rose-colour;
as though gold were driving before it all the colours of the world. The
lines of the landscape down which they sped, were the simple, strict,
yet swerving, lines of a rushing river; so that it was almost as if they
were being sucked down in a huge still whirlpool. Turnbull had some such
feeling, for he spoke for the first time for many hours.

"If we go down at this rate we shall be over the sea cliff," he said.

"How glorious!" said MacIan.

When, however, they had come into the wide hollow at the bottom of that
landslide, the car took a calm and graceful curve along the side of
the sea, melted into the fringe of a few trees, and quietly, yet
astonishingly, stopped. A belated light was burning in the broad morning
in the window of a sort of lodge- or gate-kee