The support of your mind
will help me.”

His voice had that quiet mastery in it which leads men to face death
with a sort of happiness and pride. I would have followed him anywhere
at that moment. At the same time his words conveyed a sense of dread
seriousness. I caught the thrill of his confidence; but also, in this
broad light of day, I felt the measure of alarm that lay behind. “You still have no strong impressions?” he asked. “Nothing happened in
the night, for instance? No vivid dreamings?”

He looked closely for my answer, I was aware. “I slept almost an unbroken sleep. I was tremendously tired, you know,
and, but for the oppressive heat----”

“Good! You still notice the heat, then,” he said to himself, rather
than expecting an answer. “And the lightning?” he added, “that
lightning out of a clear sky--that flashing--did you notice _that_?”

I answered truly that I thought I had seen a flash during a moment of
wakefulness, and he then drew my attention to certain facts before
moving on. “You remember the sensation of warmth when you put the letter to your
forehead in the train; the heat generally in the house last evening,
and, as you now mention, in the night. You heard, too, the Colonel’s
stories about the appearances of fire in this wood and in the house
itself, and the way his brother and the gamekeeper came to their deaths
twenty years ago.”

I nodded, wondering what in the world it all meant. “And you get no clue from these facts?” he asked, a trifle surprised. I searched every corner of my mind and imagination for some inkling of
his meaning, but was obliged to admit that I understood nothing so far. “Never mind; you will later. And now,” he added, “we will go over the
wood and see what we can find.”

His words explained to me something of his method. We were to keep our
minds alert and report to each other the least fancy that crossed the
picture-gallery of our thoughts. Then, just as we started, he turned
again to me with a final warning. “And, for your safety,” he said earnestly, “imagine _now_--and for that
matter, imagine always until we leave this place--imagine with the
utmost keenness, that you are surrounded by a shell that protects you. Picture yourself inside a protective envelope, and build it up with the
most intense imagination you can evoke. Pour the whole force of your
thought and will into it. Believe vividly all through this adventure
that such a shell, constructed of your thought, will and imagination,
surrounds you completely, and that nothing can pierce it to attack.”

He spoke with dramatic conviction, gazing hard at me as though to
enforce his meaning, and then moved forward and began to pick his way
over the rough, tussocky ground into the wood. And meanwhile, knowing
the efficacy of his prescription, I adopted it to the best of my
ability. The trees at once closed about us like the night. Their branches met
overhead in a continuous tangle, their stems crept closer and closer,
the brambly undergrowth thickened and multiplied. We tore our trousers,
scratched our hands, and our eyes filled with fine dust that made it
most difficult to avoid the clinging, prickly network of branches and
creepers. Coarse white grass that caught our feet like string grew here
and there in patches. It crowned the lumps of peaty growth that stuck
up like human heads, fantastically dressed, thrusting up at us out of
the ground with crests of dead hair. We stumbled and floundered among
them. It was hard going, and I could well conceive it impossible to
find a way at all in the night-time. We jumped, when possible, from
tussock to tussock, and it seemed as though we were springing among
heads on a battlefield, and that this dead white grass concealed eyes
that turned to stare as we passed. Here and there the sunlight shot in with vivid spots of white light,
dazzling the sight, but only making the surrounding gloom deeper by
contrast And on two occasions we passed dark circular places in the
grass where fires had eaten their mark and left a ring of ashes. Dr. Silence pointed to them, but without comment and without pausing, and
the sight of them woke in me a singular realisation of the dread that
lay so far only just out of sight in this adventure. It was exhausting work, and heavy going. We kept close together. The
warmth, too, was extraordinary. Yet it did not seem the warmth of the
body due to violent exertion, but rather an inner heat of the mind that
laid glowing hands of fire upon the heart and set the brain in a kind
of steady blaze. When my companion found himself too far in advance,
he waited for me to come up. The place had evidently been untouched by
hand of man, keeper, forester or sportsman, for many a year; and my
thoughts, as we advanced painfully, were not unlike the state of the
wood itself--dark, confused, full of a haunting wonder and the shadow
of fear. By this time all signs of the open field behind us were hid. No
single gleam penetrated. We might have been groping in the heart of
some primeval forest. Then, suddenly, the brambles and tussocks and
string-like grass came to an end; the trees opened out; and the ground
began to slope upwards towards a large central mound. We had reached
the middle of the plantation, and before us stood the broken Druid
stones our host had mentioned. We walked easily up the little hill,
between the sparser stems, and, resting upon one of the ivy-covered
boulders, looked round upon a comparatively open space, as large,
perhaps, as a small London Square. Thinking of the ceremonies and sacrifices this rough circle of
prehistoric monoliths might have witnessed, I looked up into my
companion’s face with an unspoken question. But he read my thought and
shook his head. “Our mystery has nothing to do with these dead symbols,” he said,
“but with something perhaps even more ancient, and of another country
altogether.”

“Egypt?” I said half under my breath, hopelessly puzzled, but recalling
his words in my bedroom. He nodded. Mentally I still floundered, but he seemed intensely
preoccupied and it was no time for asking questions; so while his words
circled unintelligibly in my mind I looked round at the scene before
me, glad of the opportunity to recover breath and some measure of
composure. But hardly had I time to notice the twisted and contorted
shapes of many of the pine trees close at hand when Dr. Silence leaned
over and touched me on the shoulder. He pointed down the slope. And the
look I saw in his eyes keyed up every nerve in my body to its utmost
pitch. A thin, almost imperceptible column of blue smoke was rising among the
trees some twenty yards away at the foot of the mound. It curled up and
up, and disappeared from sight among the tangled branches overhead. It
was scarcely thicker than the smoke from a small brand of burning wood. “Protect yourself!