about and went away. It was strange but I had no desire to enter the tomb. I had seen what I had seen and the memory of it was still thrilling me to the finger-tips with a sense of ineffable glory.
I heard the sound of hurried footsteps and up the path to the garden came the dark-eyed youth whom I had met in the night upon the mountain, followed closely by a great, shaggy haired giant of a Galilean whom I had seen with the Jew at the time of his arrest—he who smote off the ear of Malchus—and again as a member of the burial party. The youth was fleeter of foot and reaching the tomb first, stooped and looked in, and after him the larger man laboured heavily up the way. His was an impetuous soul, and he flung himself immediately into the chamber.
A sudden horrid suspicion entered my mind. Shall I ever forget the shock of it—the suspicion that after all I had been dreaming, or at most walking in my sleep. While I slept or dreamed my soldiers had been frightened away and the body stolen. My ecstasy was not real. My emotions were begotten of troubled slumber, and after all I was but a stupid dolt. The suspicion, while it lasted, gripped me sickeningly. For a moment my state of mind was pitiful. Then an aggressive spirit leaped up within me. I would see whether this were so, could be so, or not, and following them I, too, entered the tomb.
The air was heavy with the odour of spices which had been wrapped about the body. These were heaped in a careless pile where they might have fallen from an upright figure as a shroud was unwrapped. Unwrapped, I say, Marcus. Note that. For here the theory of a
