[The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens]@TWC D-Link book
The Mystery of Edwin Drood

CHAPTER XII--A NIGHT WITH DURDLES
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Ask the first hundred citizens of Cloisterham, met at random in the streets at noon, if they believed in Ghosts, they would tell you no; but put them to choose at night between these eerie Precincts and the thoroughfare of shops, and you would find that ninety-nine declared for the longer round and the more frequented way.

The cause of this is not to be found in any local superstition that attaches to the Precincts--albeit a mysterious lady, with a child in her arms and a rope dangling from her neck, has been seen flitting about there by sundry witnesses as intangible as herself--but it is to be sought in the innate shrinking of dust with the breath of life in it from dust out of which the breath of life has passed; also, in the widely diffused, and almost as widely unacknowledged, reflection: 'If the dead do, under any circumstances, become visible to the living, these are such likely surroundings for the purpose that I, the living, will get out of them as soon as I can.' Hence, when Mr.Jasper and Durdles pause to glance around them, before descending into the crypt by a small side door, of which the latter has a key, the whole expanse of moonlight in their view is utterly deserted.
One might fancy that the tide of life was stemmed by Mr.Jasper's own gatehouse.

The murmur of the tide is heard beyond; but no wave passes the archway, over which his lamp burns red behind his curtain, as if the building were a Lighthouse.
They enter, locking themselves in, descend the rugged steps, and are down in the Crypt.

The lantern is not wanted, for the moonlight strikes in at the groined windows, bare of glass, the broken frames for which cast patterns on the ground.

The heavy pillars which support the roof engender masses of black shade, but between them there are lanes of light.


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