‘I don’t know where the altar stone is,’ he said, ‘but that looks a cosy little crack between those two big stones.’
He crept into it, and lay down on a flat stone that stretched between and under two fallen pillars.
The night was soft and warm; it was Midsummer Eve.
‘Mother isn’t going till the twenty-sixth,’ he told himself. ‘I sha’n’t bother about hotels. I shall send her a telegram in the morning, and get a carriage at the nearest stables and go [p77 straight back to her. No, she won’t be angry when she hears all about it. I’ll ask her to let me go to sea instead of to school. It’s much more manly. Much more manly … much much more, much.’
He was asleep. And the wild west wind that swept across the plain spared the little corner where he lay asleep, curled up in his sacking with the inside-out school cap, doubled twice, for pillow.
He fell asleep on the smooth, solid, steady stone.
He awoke on the stone in a world that rocked as sea-boats rock on a choppy sea.
He went to sleep between fallen moveless pillars of a ruin older than any world that history knows.
He awoke in the shade of a purple awning through which strong sunlight filtered, and purple curtains that flapped and strained in the wind; and there was a smell, a sweet familiar smell, of tarred ropes and the sea.
‘I say,’ said Quentin to himself, ‘here’s a rum go.’