There were more gray clouds than before. He watched idly as a large bank of clouds approached the sun, screened it in a haze and then obscured it. He waited for the cloud to break, but it didn’t. He felt a draft of colder, damper air and heard a light rustle in the leaves. The leaves weren’t golden anymore, but had taken on that strange, luminous yellow color that he’d often noticed when there was electricity in the air. He stood up.

“It’s going to rain. We’d better head home,” said Luc.

“Not yet. We’ll visit the temple first.”

Luc looked up at the high crag.

“That would take a while,” he said.

“Not long,” answered Thomas. “Let’s go,” he commanded.

They crossed over the bridge to the island again. And then they took the steep path that led them up the hill. It was quite picturesque, like climbing a mountain ravine, and Thomas was happy even if Luc was not.

They were halfway up when, from the west, they heard a distant rumble of thunder.

“Let’s go back down,” said Luc.

“Why?” said Thomas.

“Do you want to get caught in a thunderstorm?”

“Why not?” said Thomas. “Come on.”

So they continued up the steep and winding path until they emerged at the little round temple. And just as they did, they heard the thunder again, and this time it echoed and reverberated all around the huge, broad valley in which Paris lay, so that if he hadn’t felt the wind from the west, Thomas would hardly have known where the weather was coming from.

The temple was a small folly, modeled on the famous Temple of Vesta in Rome. From this high vantage point, Thomas could see the broad summit of Montmartre, and looking to his left, between high trees, he glimpsed the towers of Notre Dame in the distance. He knew there were many strange figures on the top of those towers: Gothic gargoyles and all manner of stone monsters, looking out over Paris, and it pleased him to think that, perched up here on this crag, he might be as high in the sky as they were.

The gray clouds were overhead now, but a few miles to the west was a great line of darker clouds. Beneath it, a curtain of falling rain stretched across the city. Above it rose layers of black cloud banks. As Thomas gazed at these, he saw a flash within, followed by a crack of thunder.

The curtain of rain was advancing up the far side of Montmartre. On the hilltop, the tall scaffolding on the site of the rising Sacré Coeur stood out like a group of gallows. And while Thomas watched, the big site seemed to dissolve, and the hill with it, as the rain swallowed them up.