And down in the halls there came to us
wandering--strangest thing that ever strayed through deserted grandeur--a
brown, broken horse, lean, with a sore flank and a head of tremendous
age. It stopped and gazed at us, as though we might be going to give it
things to eat, then passed on, stumbling over the ruined marbles. For a
moment we had thought him ghost--one of the many. But he was not, since
his hoofs sounded. The scrambling clatter of them had died out into
silence before we came to that dark, crypt-like chamber whose marble
columns were ringed in iron, veritable pillars of foundation. And then
we saw that our old guide's hands were full of newspapers. She struck a
match; they caught fire and blazed. Holding high that torch, she said:
"See! Up there's his name, above where he stood. The auctioneer. Oh
yes, indeed! Here's where they sold them!"
Below that name, decaying on the wall, we had the slow, uncanny feeling
of some one standing there in the gleam and flicker from that paper
torch. For a moment the whole shadowy room seemed full of forms and
faces. Then the torch lied out, and our old guide, pointing through an
archway with the blackened stump of it, said:
"'Twas here they kept them indeed, yes!"
We saw before us a sort of vault, stone-built, and low, and long. The
light there was too dim for us to make out anything but walls and heaps
of rusting scrap-iron cast away there and mouldering own.
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