G K Chesterton

The Man Who Knew Too Much G K Chesterton

Abruptly, in the middle of those sunny and windy flats, he came upon a sort ofcleft almost narrow enough to be called a crack in the land. It was just large enoughto be the water-course for a small stream which vanished at intervals under greentunnels of undergrowth, as if in a dwarfish forest. Indeed, he had an odd feeling as ifhe were a giant looking over the valley of the pygmies. When he dropped into thehollow, however, the impression was lost; the rocky banks, though hardly above theheight of a cottage, hung over and had the profile of a precipice. As he began towander down the course of the stream, in idle but romantic curiosity, and saw thewater shining in short strips between the great gray boulders and bushes as soft asgreat green mosses, he fell into quite an opposite vein of fantasy. It was rather as ifthe earth had opened and swallowed him into a sort of underworld of dreams. Andwhen he became conscious of a human figure dark against the silver stream, sittingon a large boulder and looking rather like a large bird, it was perhaps with some ofthe premonitions proper to a man who meets the strangest friendship of his life.