Dedicated to Mary.
PART IV.
'Bottomless perdition.'—Milton.
Fog and cloud! Nothing can be seen from the bastions of the castle of the Holy Trinity, to the right or to the left, in front or in the rear, but dense, motionless, snowy mist; a spectral image of that deluge-wrath which, as it rose to sweep o'er earth, once broke against these stern, steep cliffs and beetling peaks of rock: no trace is to be seen of the buried valley, for the ghostly waves of the cold, white sea of foam shroud it closely in their stifling veils; the glowing face of the crimson sun shines not as yet upon earth's winding sheet of silent, clinging, pallid vapor.
The tower of the castle stands upon a bold and naked granite peak. Built of the strong rock from which it soars by the giant labor of the now dying Past, it seems during the lapse of centuries to have grown up from its stony heart, as the human breast grows from the broad back of the Centaur. A single banner streams above its lofty turret, the only banner of the Cross now raised on earth; the symbol of God's mystic love alone floats high enough to pierce into the unclouded blue of the stormy sky!
The white and sleeping mist gradually awakens; the sighing and howling of the bleak winds are heard above; the vapor palpitates in the first rays of the coming sun, and a drifting ice-floe of curdling clouds drives wildly o'er this quickening sea of fog and foam.
Other voices, human voices, mingle with the wails and sobs of the passing storm: borne upward on the ghastly waves of the spectral cloud sea, they break against the walls of the granite castle.
The pallid shroud of mist is suddenly riven, and through the walls of the chasm torn through the heart of the white foam, glimpses are seen of the abyss below.
How dark it looks in the depths! A sea of heads in wild commotion surges there; the valley swarms with human life as ocean's slimy sands with creeping things that writhe and sting.
The sun! the sun! He mounts above the rocky peaks; the pallid vapors rise in blood and melt in gold, and as they roll and lift into the sky, more and more distinctly grow upon the view the threatening swarms of men still gathering below.