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.
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