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 his 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.