She did as he told her.  A sudden trembling came over her, and darkness fell across her eyes.  She tried to cry out, but could utter no sound.  Her brain reeled.  It seemed to her that Haddo bade her cover her face.  She gasped for breath, and it was as if the earth spun under her feet.  She appeared to travel at an immeasurable speed.  She made a slight movement, and Haddo told her not to look round.  An immense terror seized her.  She did not know whither she was borne, and still they went quickly, quickly; and the hurricane itself would have lagged behind them.  At last their motion ceased; and Oliver was holding her arm.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ he said.  ‘Open your eyes and stand up.’

The night had fallen; but it was not the comfortable night that soothes the troubled minds of mortal men; it was a night that agitated the soul mysteriously so that each nerve in the body tingled.  There was a lurid darkness which displayed and yet distorted the objects that surrounded them.  No moon shone in the sky, but small stars appeared to dance on the heather, vague night-fires like spirits of the damned.  They stood in a vast and troubled waste, with huge stony boulders and leafless trees, rugged and gnarled like tortured souls in pain.  It was as if there had been a devastating storm, and the country reposed after the flood of rain and the tempestuous wind and the lightning.  All things about them appeared dumbly to suffer, like a man racked by torments who has not the strength even to realize that his agony has ceased.  Margaret heard the flight of monstrous birds, and they seemed to whisper strange things on their passage.  Oliver took her hand.  He led her steadily to a cross-road, and she did not know if they walked amid rocks or tombs.

She heard the sound of a trumpet, and from all parts, strangely appearing where before was nothing, a turbulent assembly surged about her.  That vast empty space was suddenly filled by shadowy forms, and they swept along like the waves of the sea, crowding upon one another’s heels.  And it seemed that all the mighty dead appeared before her; and she saw grim tyrants, and painted courtesans, and Roman emperors in their purple, and sultans of the East.  All those fierce evil women of olden time passed by her side, and now it was Mona Lisa and now the subtle daughter of Herodias.  And Jezebel looked out upon her from beneath her painted brows, and Cleopatra turned away a wan, lewd face; and she saw the insatiable mouth and the wanton eyes of Messalina, and Fustine was haggard with the eternal fires of lust.  She saw cardinals in their scarlet, and warriors in their steel, gay gentlemen in periwigs, and ladies in powder and patch.  And on a sudden, like leaves by the wind, all these were driven before the silent throngs of the oppressed; and they were innumerable as the sands of the sea.  Their thin faces were earthy with want and cavernous from disease, and their eyes were dull with despair.  They passed in their tattered motley, some in the fantastic rags of the beggars of Albrecht Duerer and some in the grey cerecloths of Le Nain; many wore the blouses and the caps of the rabble in France, and many the dingy, smoke-grimed weeds of English poor.  And they surged onward like a riotous crowd in narrow streets flying in terror before the mounted troops.  It seemed as though all the world were gathered there in strange confusion.