His mind was still a surging perplexity.  Clearly he had slept, and had been removed in his sleep.  But where?  And who were those people, the distant crowd beyond the deep blue pillars?  Boscastle?  He poured out and partially drank another glass of the colourless fluid.

What was this place?—­this place that to his senses seemed subtly quivering like a thing alive?  He looked about him at the clean and beautiful form of the apartment, unstained by ornament, and saw that the roof was broken in one place by a circular shaft full of light, and, as he looked, a steady, sweeping shadow blotted it out and passed, and came again and passed.  “Beat, beat,” that sweeping shadow had a note of its own in the subdued tumult that filled the air.

He would have called out, but only a little sound came into his throat.  Then he stood up, and, with the uncertain steps of a drunkard, made his way towards the archway.  He staggered down the steps, tripped on the corner of the black cloak he had wrapped about himself, and saved himself by catching at one of the blue pillars.

The passage ran down a cool vista of blue and purple and ended remotely in a railed space like a balcony brightly lit and projecting into a space of haze, a space like the interior of some gigantic building.  Beyond and remote were vast and vague architectural forms.  The tumult of voices rose now loud and clear, and on the balcony and with their backs to him, gesticulating and apparently in animated conversation, were three figures, richly dressed in loose and easy garments of bright soft colourings.  The noise of a great multitude of people poured up over the balcony, and once it seemed the top of a banner passed, and once some brightly coloured object, a pale blue cap or garment thrown up into the air perhaps, flashed athwart the space and fell.  The shouts sounded like English, there was a reiteration of “Wake!” He heard some indistinct shrill cry, and abruptly these three men began laughing.

“Ha, ha, ha!” laughed one—­a red-haired man in a short purple robe.  “When the Sleeper wakes—­When!”

He turned his eyes full of merriment along the passage.  His face changed, the whole man changed, became rigid.  The other two turned swiftly at his exclamation and stood motionless.  Their faces assumed an expression of consternation, an expression that deepened into awe.

Suddenly Graham’s knees bent beneath him, his arm against the pillar collapsed limply, he staggered forward and fell upon his face.

CHAPTER IV

THE SOUND OF A TUMULT

Graham’s last impression before he fainted was of the ringing of bells.  He learnt afterwards that he was insensible, hanging between life and death, for the better part of an hour.  When he recovered his senses, he was back on his translucent couch, and there was a stirring warmth at heart and throat.  The dark apparatus, he perceived, had been removed from his arm, which was bandaged.  The white framework was still about him, but the greenish transparent substance that had filled it was altogether gone.  A man in a deep violet robe, one of those who had been on the balcony, was looking keenly into his face.