Lower and lower drooped his aching lids and slowly he was beginning to slip away into blissful unconsciousness. How long he had remained in this state, he scarcely knew, when he was startled, as by some unknown presence.
Rousing himself with an effort and looking up, he was filled with a strange awe at the phenomenon which met his gaze. Right across the horizon that glistened with pale green hues like newly frozen water, there reposed a cloud-bank, risen from the Tyrrhene Sea, black as the blackest midnight, heavy and motionless like an enormous shadow fringed with tremulous lines of gold.
This cloud-bank seemed absolutely stirless, as if it had been thrown, a ponderous weight, into the azure vault of heaven. Ever and anon silvery veins of lightning shot luridly through its surface, while poised, as it were immediately above it, was the sun, looking like a great scarlet seal, a ball of crimson fire, destitute of rays.
For a time Eckhardt stood lost in the contemplation of this fantastic sky-phenomenon. As he did so, the sun plunged into the engulfing darkness. Lowering purple shadows crept across the heavens, but the huge cloud, palpitating with lightnings, moved not, stirred not, nor changed its shape by so much as a hair's breadth.
It appeared like a vast pall, spread out in readiness for the state burial of the world, the solemn and terrible moment: The End of Time.
Fascinated by an aspect, which in so weird a manner reflected his own feelings, Eckhardt looked upon the threatening cloud-bank as an evil omen. A strange sensation seized him, as with a hesitating fear not unmingled with wonder, he watched the lightnings come and go.
A shudder ran through his frame as he paced up and down the white-pillared Loggia, garlanded with climbing vines, roses and passion flowers, dying or decayed.
"Would the night were passed," he muttered to himself, and the man who had stormed the impregnable stronghold of Crescentius quailed before the impending issue as a child trembles in the dark.
At the hour appointed he traversed the solitary region of the Trastevere. The vast silence, the vast night, were full of solemn weirdness. The moon, at her full, soared higher and higher in the balconies of the East, firing the lofty solitudes of the heavens with her silver-beams. But immobile in the purple cavity of the western horizon there lay that ominous cloud, nerved as it were with living lightnings, which leaped incessantly from its centre, like a thousand swords, drawn from a thousand scabbards.
The deep booming noise of a bell now smote heavily on the silence. Oppressed by the weight of unutterable forebodings, Eckhardt welcomed the sound with a vague sense of relief. At the Church of the Hermits he was joined by the harper and together they rapidly traversed the region leading to the Groves. In the supervening stillness their ears caught the sound of harptones, floating through the silent autumnal night.