Creeping on hands and knees, he advanced along the subterranean passage, the light growing brighter at every step, and at last the twenty paces were left behind, he crawled from the rock, he stood in the open air.
His voice failed him, he gazed around.
Far, far above him, ascended the gray steep on which the Convent was reared, far, far above him, he beheld the blue sky, tinted with the glow of the dying day, he beheld the platform rock and the frowning tower, wrapt in clouds of lurid smoke, while tongues of forked flame, swept up to the very azure, turning the glow of the setting sun to bloody red.
He stood on the side of a ravine, with the darkness of the abyss yawning beneath him, while the rugged ascent of rocks on the opposite side rose towering before his eye, veiling the mountain lake from his sight, and giving a faint glimpse of the eastern sky.
Dark and dreary, tangled with gnarled shrubs, rough with rifted rocks, a score of fathoms down, sunk the wild abyss, with the hills, or rather the overhanging cliff gathering around its blackness, like the sides of one vast death-bowl of ebony.
In truth it looked like the crater of an extinct volcano.
With a glance Adrian beheld the smoke and flame, the Convent and the blue sky above, the glimpse of the eastern horizon, the rocks ascending on the opposite side of the ravine, and the blackness of the abyss below, and then his soul was riveted to a spectacle of horror extended at his very feet.
There before his very eyes, a mangled carcass was thrown along the surface of a rugged rock, the trunk, the limbs, the arms, the garments and draperies of gold, all mingled in one foul mass of corruption, while the face was buried amid a cluster of stunted shrubs of laurel.
Adrian reached forth his hand, he raised the face, he beheld the blue tint of corruption, the eyes lolling from their sockets, the blackened tongue hanging from the mouth!—
“The Duke,” he shrieked, “the Duke of Florence!”