No time was to be lost in making Scylla again defensible; therefore, before daybreak, the dead were all interred in a common grave, in a hollow near Monte Jaci. For one amongst the hundreds thus buried, I desired a separate and more secluded sepulchre; but, stripped of his epaulettes and orders, his body, without being recognised, had been hurried away, and entombed with the common herd in that dreadful grave, over which two hundred soldiers hurled the earth for concealment of the ghastly heaps within it. I remember the place: an orange tree, of gigantic size, shadowed it; and a ruined Grecian column may yet point it out to the tourist: it was lying near, and our soldiers placed it over the grave.
CHAPTER XIII.
REGGIO.—AN IMPROVISATORE.
Whilst I was still lying where I had sunk down exhausted—stunned by my wound, appalled by the recent discovery, weak with pain and loss of blood, and utterly prostrated in spirit—the fortress became still, or comparatively so, and the objects all around were veiled in darkness: the blue lights had burned out, and the lurid gleam of the cannon and musketry no longer flashed through the gloom. Cries and piteous exclamations of agony resounded from every quarter; and the living were dragged from beneath heaps of dead, to be sent to the hospital—an old, half-ruined convent, which was appropriated to receive the wounded; but which was soon found to be inadequate to contain them.
Three soldiers employed in searching for those who needed relief approached me; one of them bore a lantern, and its light glared on the once gay, but now tattered, uniform of Castelermo, who accompanied them, and whose fate I had altogether forgotten.
"Basta! and here he is!" he exclaimed; "only stunned, I hope.—How now, Signor Capitano?—nothing more than a few inches of the skin ripped up?"
"A cloven head, only," I replied, in a faint voice.
"Only!" he reiterated.
"An old wound broken out again. I was struck by a musket-butt on the very place where a ball grazed my head at Cefalu. But I am glad to see you alive and scatheless, after that sad tumble you had when blown out of the breach."
"I have indeed had an escape which, to my dying day, will never be forgotten. I fell only into the fosse: but a yard more, on one side, would have launched me into the deep; and, by this time, I should have been—Madonna knows where, in the depths of 'devouring Scylla.' Never shall I forget the storming of this castle, though I should live as long as father Adam."