That evening all retired as soon as sundown; but they rose again at midnight and assembled in the avenue and square, from whence, in companies of a hundred, each with its leader, they started for the cemetery.
As they went, they recited the prayers for the dead by companies, the Amen rolling from end to end of the line.
Entering the ravine was like entering a cavern. But for the sparse lamps set along the way they could not have kept the path. They went in silence here, only the sound of their multitudinous steps echoing, till a faint light began to shine into the darkness before them from where, just out of sight, every letter had been outlined with fire of that legend over the arch:—
I am the Resurrection and the Life.
Then from the midst of the long procession rose a single voice reciting the psalm: The Lord is my Shepherd.
No one, having once heard it, could mistake the voice of Dylar for any other. It was of a metallic purity, and gave worth to every word it uttered.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me, thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
As they listened they felt not the stones under their feet. Solemn and buoyant, into their souls there entered something of that spirit which has made and will make men and women march singing to martyrdom.
They passed under the arch, and in at the lower door of the cemetery. All the doors from top to bottom were open, and the lamps shed a dim radiance through the long, hushed corridors of the dead; but their flames caught a tremor as the breathing multitude went by, two by two.
They ascended inside, by ways that seemed a labyrinth, to the upper tier just under the grassy hollow of Basil’s Rest. Issuing there, they descended by the outer stairs, filling all the galleries on the eastern side of the mountain. The waning moon, rising over the eastern mountains, saw a great pyramid of pallid faces all turned her way, a dim and silent throng that did not move,—as though the dead had come forth to look at the rising of some portentous star, long prophesied, or to watch if the coming dawn should bring in the Day of Judgment.