And this impression, peculiar to this crypt, permeated the body too; it was no longer a feeling of suffocation for lack of air; on the contrary, it was the oppression of inflation, of over-fulness, which would be mitigated by degrees, allowing of easy breathing at last.
Durtal, comforted and relieved, rose to go.

By this time the crypt had become a little lighter from the growing dawn; the passages, ending in altars backing against the windows, were still dark, as a result of the ground plan, but in the perspective of each a moving gold cross was to be seen almost distinctly, rising and falling with a priest's back, between two pale stars twinkling one on each side above the tabernacle; while a third, lower and with redder flame, lighted up the book and the white napery.
Durtal wandered away to meditate in the Bishop's garden, where he had permission to walk whenever he pleased.
The garden was perfectly still, with tomb-like avenues, pollard poplars, and trampled lawns--half dead.

There was not a flower, for the Cathedral killed everything under its shadow.

Its vast deserted apse, without a statue, rose amid a flight of buttresses flung out like huge ribs, inflated as it were by the breath of incessant prayer within; shade and damp always clung round the spot; in this funereal Close, where the trees were green only in proportion as they were distant from the church, lay two microscopic ponds like the mouths of two wells; one covered to the brim with yellow-green duck-weed, the other full of brackish water of inky blackness, in which three goldfish lay as in pickle.
Durtal was fond of this neglected spot, with its reek of the grave and the salt marsh, and the mouldy smell, that earthy scent that comes up from a rotting soil of wet leaves.
He paced the alleys, where the Bishop never came, and where the children of the household, rushing about at play, destroyed the fragments of grass-plots spared by the Cathedral.

Slates cracked underfoot, flung down from the roofs by the wind, and the jackdaws croaked in answer to each other across the silent park.
Durtal came out on a terrace overlooking the city, and he rested his elbows on a parapet of grey time-eaten stone, as dry as pumice and patterned with orange and sulphur-coloured lichens.
Beneath him spread a valley crowded with smoking chimneys and roofs, veiling this upper part of the town in a tangle of blue.