Poh! I thought, so it is only claptrap after all? "Here, take the lamps, all of them, matches too, and go away so far that I cannot hear you halloo, even at your loudest. I will sit here until you come back!" So saying, I sat down upon a rock in the Star Chamber; and he, taking the lights, walked away toward the entrance of the cave.
"So then," I thought, "this is the perfect darkness, the total absence of light, which is seldom if ever known above ground; for even in the darkest night and the darkest house there are some wandering rays of light; though they may not be sufficient to enable the eye to distinguish anything, they are there; they penetrate, reflected in a hundred zigzags, into the darkest places of the outer world. But here there are miles between me and the utmost limits of their influence!"
I held my hand before my face, but could not distinguish by sight that it was there. A few pale, phosphorescent gleams, that seemed to be wandering in the air, I was convinced were only the remembrances of the optic nerve,—eidolons of the retina; but they seemed to some extent plastic to my thoughts, and ready to become the subjective creations of the brain, outlined in the dark. I could conceive then how the brain, excited by fear, or stimulated by emotion, might multiply these phantasms, moulding them into the likeness of objects and beings that never had any existence in reality. My sense of hearing, too, seemed preternaturally sharpened; I could hear the ticking of the watch in my pocket, the throbbing of my own heart, the murmur of the air in my lungs. I held my breath so that the slightest sound from any other source than my own organism should not escape me; the ringing vacancy in my ears grew more and more painful. Not the remotest breath of any sound, except a faint dropping of water in some distant place! (I could think of none but in that awful place called Gorin's Dome.) It seemed to whisper, "Hush! hush! hush!" Sometimes I could not hear the dropping; for just the same reason that, if one listens intently to the ticking of a clock for ten minutes, there are intervals when his ear cannot detect it, because of its regular monotonous sound.
In such intervals the tympanum of the ear, aching with the dead collapse of its world, made sounds for itself; and it required the exercise of reason to convince myself, sometimes, that I did not hear distant babbling voices.
But hark! There is a sound! Not distant, but near! Here!—There! A sound like large, soft feet treading cautiously. No, not that, but—something breathing. Pshaw! I believe it was only the sound of my own respiration after all!
I did not exactly "whistle to keep my courage up," but, feeling that I must do something to assert my vitality, my antagonism to this overpowering dark, I cleared my throat vehemently, defiantly,—Ahem! Ahem! Ahem!! But it sounded so incongruous, so impertinent I might say, in the midst of that awful silence! Besides, it woke such queer echoes from unexpected quarters, that I stopped to listen, and heard the water-drops again in Gorin's Dome, whispering, "Hush! hush! hush!" And from all the gloomy chambers and tunnels came the echo, breathing, "Hush! hash! hush!"
It began to be terrifying to think that release from this hell of silence was dependent upon one man's will, and he too a man I had never seen until within a few hours. Where was he now, my dark-faced guide? What if he should not be able to find me again in the midst of this hundred miles of tunnels that look so much alike? What if he should not intend to come? What if—But, thank Heaven! there he is at last! That is the firm, substantial sound of a mortal footstep; not those stealthy, phantom steps I seemed to hear before! There too is the distant glinting of the red lamplight on the sides of the cave! How long it takes him to get here! There he is at last! Blessed be his black face! how unlike the pale, phosphorescent forms I fancied just a little while ago! How foolish seem all those dreadful fancies now, so terribly real then!
AN AUTUMN SONG.
Below the headland with its cedar-plumes
A lapse of spacious water twinkles keen,
An ever-shifting play of gleams and glooms
And flashes of clear green.