What a ridiculous adversary for the governor of Calais in his strong city, still so impregnably guarded!
However, Lord Wentworth, whatever the reason may have been, could neither overcome this indefinable dread nor explain it.
But he felt its presence, and he could not sleep.
CHAPTERXVIII
BETWEEN TWO CHASMS
The Risbank fort, which on account of its eight faces was also called the Octagonal Tower, was built, as we have said, at the entrance of Calais Harbor, in front of the sand-dunes; and its black and frowning mass of granite towered aloft upon another mass, as forbidding and quite as colossal, of solid cliff.
The sea, when the tide was high, broke against the cliff, but never touched the lowest courses of the stone walls of the fort.
Now, the sea was running very high and very threateningly on the night of the 4th of January, 1558, and toward four o'clock in the morning of the 5th it gave forth that resounding but mournful moaning which makes it resemble an ever restless and despairing soul.
Suddenly, a short time after the sentinel who was stationed upon the platform of the tower from two o'clock to four had been relieved by him whose tour of duty ran from four to six, a sound like a human cry, as if uttered by lungs of brass, made itself distinctly heard amid the tempest, over the moaning of the sea.
Then the newly arrived sentry might have been seen to start, listen attentively, and lean his cross-bow against the wall, after he had made sure of the source of this strange sound. Next, when he had satisfied himself that no eye was upon him, he lifted, with a mighty arm, his sentry-box from the rock, and drew from beneath it a pile of rope which assumed the shape of a long knotted ladder, which he securely fastened to the pieces of iron fixed in the battlements.