It was a soft and luminous night; there was the faintest of south winds now and then wandering amongst the tops of the pines, and fanning their aromatic odours out of them. The sound of little threads of water trickling through the sand and moss, and falling downward through the heather, was the only sound, save when a night bird called through the dark, or a night beetle whirred on its way.
The summit of the hillside was sere and arid, and its bold stony expanse had seldom a living thing on it by daylight. By night, when the priest and sacristan of St. Fulvo were sleeping, there was not a single sign of any life, except the blowing of the pine-tops in the breeze.
He had never been there except by broad day; his knees shook under him as he looked up at the tall straight black tower, with the moonlit clouds shining through the bars of its open belfry. If he had not heard the voice of Santina crying to him, 'No coward shall win me,' he would have turned and fled.
He was alone as utterly as though all the world were dead.
It was still barely midnight when he saw the bell-tower on high looming darker than the dark clouds about it, and the pine-trees and the presbytery and the walls of the burial-ground gathered round it black and gaunt, their shapes all fused together in one heap of gloom.
The guardians of the place, old men who went early to their beds, were sleeping somewhere under those black roofs against the tower. Below, the hills and valleys were all wrapped in the silence of the country night.
On some far road a tired team of charcoal-bearing mules might be treading woefully to the swing of their heavy bells, or some belated string of wine-carts might be creeping carefully through the darkness, the men half-drunk and their beasts half-asleep.
But there was no sound or sign of them in the vast brooding stillness which covered like great soft wings the peaceful hills overlapping one another, and the serenity of the mountains bathed in the rays of the moon.
There was no sound anywhere: not even the bleat of a sheep from the flocks, nor the bark of a dog from the homesteads.
Caris crossed himself, and mounted the steep path which led to the church-gate.