Page:The Ball and the Cross.djvu/84

“Yes,” he said, with a sort of stupidity. “It’s a very big place.”

There was a somewhat unmeaning silence, and then MacIan said again:

“It’s a very big place. When I first came into it I was frightened of it. Frightened exactly as one would be frightened at the sight of a man forty feet high. I am used to big things where I come from, big mountains that seem to fill God’s infinity, and the big sea that goes to the end of the world. But then these things are all shapeless and confused things, not made in any familiar form. But to see the plain, square, human things as large as that, houses so large and streets so large, and the town itself so large, was like having screwed some devil’s magnifying glass into one’s eye. It was like seeing a porridge bowl as big as a house, or a mouse-trap made to catch elephants.”

“Like the land of the Brobdingnagians,” said Turnbull, smiling.

“Oh! Where is that?” said MacIan.

Turnbull said bitterly, “In a book,” and the silence fell suddenly between them again.

They were sitting in a sort of litter on the hillside; all the things they had hurriedly collected, in various places, for their flight, were strewn