It was about midnight when she waked, and with so vivid an awakening that to sleep longer seemed impossible. In place of the languid quiescence of the evening before, there was a consuming impatience to know all without an hour’s delay. Close to her was the unsolved mystery of her mother’s birth and of her own fate. She could wait no longer.
She lighted her candle, and went softly out into the ante-room. All was still. She tried the door opposite her own. It opened on a broad stair that descended between two blank walls.
Closing the door noiselessly behind her, she went down, candle in hand, and reached a corridor and a second stair. Across the foot of this second stair shone a soft light. It was the same light that shone outside her window above,—a passing moonlight that had gathered to itself all the star-beams in the air and all the frosty reflections of its own crescent splendor from snow-clad heights and icy peaks, and fused them in a lambent silver.
Tacita set her candle on the stair, and went down into a long hall, of which the whole outer side was an arcade, and beyond the arcade was a piazza open to the night, and with a wide space beyond its parapet. As in a dream, she passed the arcade; and before her lay San Salvador, the city of the Holy King!
CHAPTER IX.
San Salvador was built on a plain that might once have been the bed of a lake formed by mountain torrents partially confined. It was an irregular oval, two miles in length from north to south, and a mile and a half wide. As large an exact paralellogram as the space would allow was surrounded by a deep canal, or river, shut in by balustrades on both sides, and having its outlet southward through the mountains. This space was the town, as compactly built as possible.
Across the centre, from east to west, ran a wide avenue that expanded at middle length to a square. Seen from a height this avenue and square looked like a huge cross laid down across the town. Narrow streets, alternating with single blocks of houses, ran north and south, only an open space of a few feet being left all round next the river. The cross-streets did not make a complete separation of the houses, but cut away only the basement and floor above, so that one looked across the town through a succession of arches.
The houses were all of gray stone, three stories high, with a patio, a flat roof, and two fronts. There was no sign of an outbuilding, nor was there a blade of grass in the gray stone pavement that covered every inch of ground inside the river. But there were plants on the roofs. At each end of the avenue a bridge as wide crossed the river; and there were four narrow bridges at each of the four sides of the town.
In the southern half of the square was a building called the Assembly, from its use, or the Star-house, from its shape. It had three triangular stories set one over the other in the shape of a six-pointed star, the protruding angles forming vestibules below with their supporting columns, and terraces above. These columns restored the symmetry of the structure, and gave it grace and lightness.
In the northern square was a low bell-tower with a pulpit built against its southern side. The first floor was an open room surrounded by arches.