They turned the corner--and a blaze of Italian sunlight struck at their eyes with positive dazzlement. There lay the Coliseum--tier on tier of eager faces under the blue sky of Italy. They were level with the arena. In the arena were crosses; from them drooped bleeding figures. On the sand beasts prowled, bodies lay. They saw it all through bars. They seemed to be in the place where the chosen victims waited their turn, waited for the lions and the crosses, the palm and the crown. Close by Edward was a group--an old man, a woman--children. He could have touched them with his hand. The woman and the man stared in an agony of terror straight in the eyes of a snarling tiger, ten feet long, that stood up on its hind feet and clawed through the bars at them. The youngest child, only, unconscious of the horror, laughed in the very face of it. Roman soldiers, unmoved in military vigilance, guarded the group of martyrs. In a low cage to the left more wild beasts cringed and seemed to growl, unfed. Within the grating on the wide circle of yellow sand lions and tigers drank the blood of Christians. Close against the bars a great lion sucked the chest of a corpse on whose blood-stained face the horror of the death-agony was printed plain. "Good God!" said Edward. Vincent took his arm suddenly, and he started with what was almost a shriek. "What a nervous chap you are!" said Vincent complacently, as they regained the street where the lights were, and the sound of voices and the movement of live human beings--all that warms and awakens nerves almost paralysed by the life in death of waxen immobility. "I don't know," said Edward. "Let's have a vermouth, shall we? There's something uncanny about those wax things. They're like life--but they're much more like death. Suppose they moved? I don't feel at all sure that they don't move, when the lights are all out, and there's no one there." He laughed. "I suppose you were never frightened, Vincent?" "Yes, I was once," said Vincent, sipping his absinthe. "Three other men and I were taking turns by twos to watch a dead man. It was a fancy of his mother's. Our time was up, and the other watch hadn't come. So my chap--the one who was watching with me, I mean--went to fetch them. I didn't think I should mind. But it was just like you say." "How?" "Why, I kept thinking: suppose it should move--it was so like life. And if it did move, of course it would have been because it _was_ alive, and I ought to have been glad, because the man was my friend. But all the same, if it had moved I should have gone mad." "Yes," said Edward; "that's just exactly it." Vincent called for a second absinthe. "But a dead body's different to wax-works," he said. "I can't understand any one being frightened of _them_." "Oh, can't you?" The contempt in the other's tone stung him. "I bet you wouldn't spend a night alone in that place." "I bet you five pounds I do!"