grass-grown thoroughfares.... Montpellier-the-Old indeed! Duchemin
reflected; but rather Montpellier-the-Dead--dead with the utter
deadness of that which has never lived.

Marvelling, he went down into the city of stone and passed through its
desolate ways, shaping a course for the southern limits, where he
thought to find the road to Millau. Fatigue alone dictated this choice
of the short cut. But for that, he confesses he might have gone the
long way round; he was no more prone to childish terrors than any other
man, but to his mind there was something sinister in the portentous
immobility of the place; in its silence, its want of excuse for being,
a sense of age-old evil like an inarticulate menace.

Out of this mood he failed to laugh himself. Time and again he would
catch himself listening for he knew not what, approaching warily the
corner of the next huge monolith as if thinking to surprise behind it
some ghoulish rite, glancing apprehensively down the corridors he
passed, or overshoulder for some nameless thing that stalked him and
was never there when he looked, but ever lurked impishly just beyond
the tail of his eye.

So that, when abruptly a man moved from behind a rock some thirty or
forty paces ahead, Duchemin stopped short, with jangled nerves and a
barely smothered exclamation. Possibly a shape of spectral terror would
have been less startling; in that weird place and hour humanity seemed
more incongruous than the supernatural. It was at once apparent that
the man had neither knowledge of nor concern with the stranger. For an
instant he stood with his back to the latter, peering intently down the
aisle which Duchemin had been following, a stout body filling out too
well the uniform of a private soldier in the American Expeditionary