Rumour had prepared him to know the place when he saw it, nothing for its stupendous lunacy.  Heaven knows what convulsion or measured process of Nature accomplished this thing.  For his part Duchemin was unable to accept any possible scientific explanation, and will go to his grave believing that some half-witted cyclops, back beyond the dimmest dawn of Time, created Montpellier-le-Vieux in an hour of idleness, building him a play city of titanic monoliths, then wandered away and forgot it altogether.

He saw what seemed to be a city at least two miles in length, more than half as wide, a huddle of dwellings of every shape and size, a labyrinth of narrow, tortuous streets broken here and there by wide and stately avenues, with public squares and vast cirques (of such amphitheatres he counted no less than six) and walls commanded by a citadel.

But never door or window broke the face of any building, no chimney exhaled a breath of smoke, neither wheel nor foot disturbed these 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 Forces—­that most ungainly, inutile, unbecoming costume that ever graced the form of man.

Then he half turned, beckoned hastily to one invisible to the observer, and furtively moved on.  As furtively his signal was answered by a fellow who wore the nondescript garments of a peasant.  And as suddenly as they had come into sight, the two slipped round a rocky shoulder, and the street of monoliths was empty.