CHAPTER V.
The Desierto.
After fastening our horses in the outer court of the convent, we chose, near the entrance of the building, the cell which seemed to be most convenient for shelter. The first moments of our halt were devoted to an interchange of reflections, half merry, half serious, upon the danger we had run. Don Romulo confessed that he had taken part in seventeen conspiracies; that he had been banished, under circumstances of great aggravation, from three republics—from Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia, but that the danger he had just escaped was the most imminent he had ever experienced in his life. As for the monk, the student, and the officer, they owned frankly enough that, when the danger appeared most imminent, and they had seemed callous to it, they were far from feeling so in their minds. After some more talk of a like kind, our eyes roamed around the old monastery to which chance had directed us for shelter.
Situated in the midst of a tract of country which reminds one of the Grande Chartreuse of Grenoble, the convent of the Desierto is, to all outward appearance, far from being in a ruinous condition. Its cupolas and spires still shoot as high as ever above the pines which surround it; and although half a century has rolled away since the monks quitted it, ivy has not yet entirely covered the embrasures of its deserted cells. The green moss which grows upon its walls shows only the want of repair and the ravages of time. You must pass through the first quadrangle, which is still in good preservation, so as to reach the interior of the convent, before seeing the spectacle of melancholy and desolation which there meets your eye. The dilapidated cupolas admit the daylight through large chinks, the pilasters in the cloisters are crumbling away, large stones have been forced from their sockets, heaps of ruins block up the choir and the nave of the chapel, and a thick mantle of pellitories covers the rubbish. The vapors which hang in a dense curtain round the summit of the mountain, at the foot of which the convent is built, fall in fine rain on the bare stones, and cover every thing with an icy moisture. Above the high altar, through one of the numerous fissures in the dome, the condensed vapor escapes, and falls drop by drop with the regularity of a water-clock, as if to mark the flight of time, and to relieve, by the light noise it makes on the marble, the melancholy silence which reigns in this dreary solitude. Such is the convent of the Desierto, seen by the light of day and under a clear sky. Let any one fancy its appearance at the time we sought refuge within its walls, when the storm, which had lasted since twilight, was scarcely over. Imagine the beams of the moon, fitfully streaming through its deserted arches, and the wind whistling in the empty nave, in its organ loft, in its solitary cells, and he will have some idea of the shelter in which we spent the remainder of the night.
We stood shivering in our wet clothes, and our first business was to seek materials for a fire. We took each a different part of the convent. The quarter in which I was engaged happened to be the most ruinous in the whole building. The remembrance of the old monk of St. Francis often came into my mind; and, in passing along the deserted galleries, I could not help fancying I saw him flitting through the gloomy arches. Around me the pillars stretched their great shadows upon the ground, whitened by the moonbeams. A stillness, as of the grave, rested every where. The ivy curtains alone shook in the wind.
From the cloister I entered a vast corridor. Through the large chinks in the vaulted roof above the moonbeams stealthily penetrated. In the distance I thought I observed a red glow on the flagstones playing amid the surrounding whiteness, and imagined I heard the snort of a horse which did not seem to proceed from the court where we had fastened our steeds. At the same instant my companions called me; I eagerly joined them. They had collected some brushwood, as they could find nothing better. The officer, Don Blas, affirmed that he had seen, by the light of the moon, in a distant court, a horse which was not one of ours. The student pretended he had met the ghost of one of the monks who had been buried in the convent. A short silence succeeded. Don Romulo was the first to break it.
"Here is a charming variety of horrors; the horse of a bandit; the ghost of a monk; spectres and malefactors!"
We tried to induce Fray Serapio to pronounce the classical formula of exorcism in his formidable Latin, but the monk replied tartly,