Then I made ready to follow him, while he, observing this, prepared to lead the way.
All was profound and dark outside that cell when once we were in the passage--so dark that, ere I had barely reached it, I felt his great hand upon my arm, felt him clutching my sleeves between his fingers. And thus together we went on, he silent as a corpse, except for his breathing, which sometimes I heard--sometimes, too, felt upon my cheek--I going to my death.
One thing I noticed, even in these moments of intensity. We went the opposite way from that by which I had first been brought--the opposite way from which his footsteps, when he had been shod, had invariably sounded; also the opposite way from which my love had come to bid me a last farewell, and had been carried insensible after our parting.
Whither was I being taken?
The end of the corridor was reached in the darkness; I knew that by the fact that his grasp tightened perceptibly on my sleeve; also that, by a pressure of his fingers on it, he was turning me somewhat to the left; likewise, that grasp put a degree of curb upon me; a moment later seemed to signify that I was to go on again. And it felt to me that, in a way, I was being supported--held up.
Another instant, and I knew why. We were descending stairs--on the way down, doubtless, to some exit that should lead to my place of doom! Still I resisted not. One path to oblivion served as well as another.
By the manner in which the steps were cut I knew at once that we were in some tower, and that the stairs were circular; also my hand, which I kept against the side, told me the same thing. Moreover, there were [oe]illets, or arrow slits, in the wall, through which I could see the moon shining on another wall, which seemed to be some fifty paces off--probably, I thought, the opposite wall of some courtyard built into, or by the side of, the huge ramparts.
Of sound there was none, no noise of any kind, no tramp of sentry to be heard, although I knew well enough that on the ramparts themselves soldiers were kept constantly on guard. Nothing; all as still as death, the death to which I was being led.
At last the stairs ended. My feet told me we were on the level now, a level into which they sank somewhat as I took step after step, whereby I judged that we were walking on sand, and wondered in what part of that prison, of those huge ramparts, we might be. Surely, I thought, some lowermost vault or dungeon, perhaps beneath the foundations of the structure, beneath the rocks between which the river flowed.
"My God!" I murmured to myself, "is this my fate? To be immured forever in some dark dungeon in the bowels of the earth, where neither light, nor sound--never hope--can come again. Better death at once, swift and merciful, than this. Far better."