by the position of the sun: and after a good many stoppages at houses,
and by railway-banks, I came, at about eleven in the night, to a great
and populous town.

By the Dane John and the Cathedral, I immediately recognised it as
Canterbury, which I knew quite well. And I walked up Castle Street to
the High Street, conscious for the first time of that
regularly-repeated sound, like a sob or groan, which was proceeding from
my throat. As there was no visible moon, and these old streets very dim,
I had to pick my way, lest I should desecrate the dead with my foot, and
they all should rise with hue and cry to hunt me. However, the bodies
here were not numerous, most, as before, being foreigners: and these,
scattered about this strict old English burg that mourning dark night,
presented such a scene of the baneful wrath of God, and all abomination
of desolation, as broke me quite down at one place, where I stood in
travail with jeremiads and sore sobbings and lamentations, crying out
upon it all, God knows.

Only when I stood at the west entrance of the Cathedral I could discern,
spreading up the dark nave, to the lantern, to the choir, a
phantasmagorical mass of forms: I went a little inward, and striking
three matches, peered nearer: the two transepts, too, seemed
crowded--the cloister-doorway was blocked--the southwest porch thronged,
so that a great congregation must have flocked hither shortly before
their fate overtook them.

Here it was that I became definitely certain that the after-odour of the
poison was not simply lingering in the air, but was being more or less
given off by the bodies: for the blossomy odour of this church actually
overcame that other odour, the whole rather giving the scent of old