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PAST AND PRESENT 197 Cilicia ! Phrygia ! As I looked I repeated the words to myself. In the smallest fragment of matter which the imagination can represent to us we learn from science that there are unnumbered atoms, and that these atoms are all of them in unceasing move-ment. So in some simple words there are tribes of meanings and of memories. ' We ought to be moving,' said Mrs. St. John at last. 'It will never do for us to be benighted in these mountains.' Her words restored me to the present, with all its silence and solitude, and put an end to that revel of dreams which had just been making my mind a Field of the Cloth of Gold. But the waking was merely the waking from one charmed existence to another. Far underneath us, between the mountain base and the sea, lay a belt of groves and olive-yards, dotted with gleaming villages and fringed with little promontories that ran into the waves like mulberry leaves. From amongst these, as if from some submerged world, up through the air came a musical tinkle of goat bells and the miniature shouts of undistinguishable human beings. Around us the ruined masonry enclosed an enchanted quiet. Near us on thè floor, which the queen's feet once had trodden, lay the bleaching bones of a kid, the remains of some vulture's feast. Nothing that we could see moved, except the bells of some near anemones, and a vulture itself overhead, wheeling in slow circles. We remained for a few minutes longer, that I

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