“Let me try to take it in a moment,” he said.

* * * * *

They were standing on the highest platform of the pile of three churches that had been raised over a hundred years ago, now in the very centre of the enormous city that had grown little by little around the sacred place.  Beneath them, straight in front, approached from where they stood by two vast sweeps of balustraded steps, lay the Place, perhaps sixty feet beneath, of the shape of an elongated oval, bounded on this side and that by the old buildings where the doctors used to have their examination rooms, now used for a hundred minor purposes connected with the churches and the grotto.  At the farther end of the Place, behind the old bronze statue of Mary, rose up the comparatively new Bureau de Constatations—­a great hall (as the two had seen last night), communicating with countless consulting- and examination-rooms, where the army of State-paid doctors carried on their work.  The whole of the open Place between these buildings crawled with humanity—­not yet packed as it would be by evening—­yet already sufficiently filled by the two ever-flowing streams—­the one passing downwards to where the grotto lay out of sight on the left, the other passing up towards the lower entrance of the great hall.  It resembled an amphitheatre, and the more so, since the roofs of the buildings on every side, as well as the slope up which the steps rose to the churches, adapted now as they were to accommodate at least three hundred thousand spectators, were already beginning to show groups and strings of onlookers who came up here to survey the city.

On the right, beyond the Place, lay the old town, sloping up now, up even to the medieval castle, which fifty years ago had stood in lonely detachment, but now was faced on hill-top after hill-top, at its own level, by the enormous nursing homes and hostels, which under the direction of the Religious Orders had gradually grown up about this shrine of healing, until now, up to a height of at least five hundred feet, the city of Mary stood on bastion after bastion of the lower slopes of the hills, like some huge auditorium of white stone, facing down towards the river and the Holy Place.

Finally, on the left, immediately to the left of the two priests who stood silently looking, fifty feet below, ran the sweep of the Gave, crossed by innumerable bridges which gave access to the crowding town beyond the water, where once had been nothing but meadowland and the beginning of the great southern plain of France.

There was an air of extraordinary peace and purity about this place, thought Monsignor.  Whiteness was the predominating colour—­whiteness beneath, and whiteness running up high on the right on to the hills—­and above the amazing blue of the southern sky.  It was high and glorious summer about them, with a breeze as intoxicating as wine and as fresh as water.  From across the Place