University of Virginia Library

28. CHAPTER XXVIII.

It was late in the night; a horizontal moon flung
the long shadows of the houses over the wide streets
of Cholula, when the knight Calavar, wrapped in his
black mantle, strode along through the deserted city.
With no definite object before him, unless to fly, or
perhaps to give way, in solitude, to the bitter thoughts
that oppressed him, he suffered himself to be guided
as much by accident as by his wayward impulses;
and as he passed on, at every step, some mutation
of his fancies, or some trivial incident on the way,
conspired to recall his disorder. Now, as a bat flitted
by, or an owl flew, hooting, from its perch among
some of those ruins, which yet raised their broken

and blackened walls, in memory of the cruelty of his
countrymen, the knight started aghast, and a mortal
fear came over him; for, in these sounds and sights,
his disturbed senses discovered the signs of the furies
that persecuted him; and even the night-breeze, wailing
round some lonely corner, or whispering among
the shrubbery of a devastated garden, seemed to him
the cries of haunting spirits.

“Miserere mei, Deus!” muttered Don Gabriel, as
a tree, bowing away from the wind, let down a
moonbeam through a fissure on his path—“the white
visage will not leave me!—Heavy was the sin, heavy
is the punishment! for even mine own fancies are become
my chastisers.”

Thus, at times, conscious, in part, of his infirmity,
and yet yielding ever, with the feebleness of a child,
to the influence of unreal horrors, he wandered
about, sometimes driven from his path by what seemed
a gaunt spectre flitting before him, sometimes impelled
onwards by a terror that followed behind:
thus he roved about, he knew not whither, until he
found himself, by chance, in the neighbourhood of
the great temple, the scene of the chief atrocities enacted
on that day which has been called, by a just
metonymy, the Massacre of Cholula. Here it was,
as had been mentioned by De Morla, that the miserable
natives, huddled together in despair, had made
their last cry to their gods, and perished under the
steel and flames of the Christians; and the memorials
of their fate were as plainly written as if the tragedy
had been the work of the previous day. No carcasses,
indeed, lay crowded among the ruins, no embers
smouldered on the square; weeds had grown upon
the place of murder, as if fattening on the blood that
had besprinkled their roots; life had utterly vanished
from the spot; and it presented the appearance of a
desert in the bosom of a populous city.

A great wall, running round the temple, had enclosed
it in a large court, once covered with the
houses of priests and devotees. The wall was shattered

and fallen, the dwellings burned and demolished;
and the pyramid, itself crumbling into ruins, lay like
the body of some huge monster among its severed
and decaying members. The flags of stone, tumbled
by the victims, in their fury, from its sides and terraces,
though they had not called up the subterraneous
rivers, had exposed the perishable earth, that composed
the body of the mound, to the vicissitudes of
the weather; and, under the heavy tropical rains, it
was washing rapidly away. The sanctuaries yet
stood on the summit, but with their walls mutilated,
and their roofs burnt; and they served only to make
the horror picturesque. A wooden cross of colossal
dimensions, raised by the conquerors, in impious
attestation that God had aided them in the labour of
slaughter, flung high its rugged arms, towering above
the broken turrets, and gave the finish of superstition
to the monument of wrath. It was a place of ruins,
dark, lugubrious, and forbidding; and as Don Gabriel
strode among the massive fragments, he found himself
in a theatre congenial with his gloomy and wrecking
spirit.

It was not without many feelings of dismay that he
plunged among the ruins; for his imagination converted
each shattered block into a living phantasm.
But still he moved on, as if urged by some irresistible
impulse, entangling himself in the labyrinth of decay,
until he scarcely knew whither to direct his steps.
Whether it was reality, or some coinage of his brain,
that presented the spectacle, he knew not; but he was
arrested in his toilsome progress by the apparition of
several figures rising suddenly among the ruins, and
as suddenly vanishing.

“Heaven pity me!” he cried: “They come feathered
like the fiends of the infidel! But I care not,
so they bring no more the white face, that is so
ghastly!—And yet, this is her day!—this is her day!”

Perhaps it was his imagination, that decked out the
spectres with such ornaments; but a less heated spectator
might have discovered in them, only the figures

of strolling savages. With his spirits strongly agitated,
his brain excited for the reception of any chimera,
he followed the direction in which these figures
seemed to have vanished; and this bringing him round
a corner of the pyramid, into the moonshine, he
instantly found himself confronted with a spectacle
that froze his blood with horror. In a spot, where
the ruins had given space for the growth of weeds
and grass, and where the vision could not be so easily
confounded,—illuminated by the moonbeams as if by
the lustre of the day,—he beheld a figure, seemingly
of a woman, clad in robes of white of an oriental
habit, full before him, and turning upon him a countenance
as wan as death.

“Miserere mei, Deus!” cried the knight, dropping
on his knees, and bowing his forehead to the earth.
“If thou comest to persecute me yet, I am here, and
I have not forgot thee!”

The murmur, as of a voice, fell on his ear, but it
brought with it no intelligence. He raised bis eye;—
dark shadows flitted before him; yet he saw nothing
save the apparition in white: it stood yet in his view;
and still the pallid visage dazzled him with its unnatural
radiance and beauty.

“Miserere mei! miserere mei!” he cried, rising to
his feet, and tottering forwards. “I live but to lament
thee, and I breathe but to repent! Speak to me, daughter
of the Alpujarras! speak to me, and let me die!”

As he spoke, the vision moved gently and slowly
away. He rushed forwards, but with knees smiting
together; and, as the white visage turned upon him
again, with its melancholy loveliness, and with a gesture
as of warning or terror, his brain spun round, his
sight failed him, and he fell to the earth in a deep
swoon.