Just as the diver holds his breath and longs for the sudden air that he must surely meet--in a moment--in another moment!--so I held as it were the breath of expectation, and believed in the coming of those who could not but seek me; for at first I felt certain they would come. They would never leave me here, to decay! But there came no voice, no glimmer of light, and I fell into a stupor in which all memory grew dim, even that of my Maddalena. What I suffered through that long period of silence and darkness I cannot tell, nor could you understand. The prisoner in his solitude is grateful for each thing that enables him to note the flight of time; and the fewer such things are the drearier is the sameness of his lot. Can you imagine it if they were all removed--a condition of simple existence in black space, with no means of marking time at all? Would you become, on that account, unconscious altogether of weariness from the long unalleviated hours? No, indeed! Take my word for it. Rather, you would find it, as I found it, a state of bondage such as one would long and pray might be the lot of such as had been, in this life, devils against the harmless; but going on through all eternity, no nearer the end now than when it started countless ages ago, an absolute monotone of dulled sense without insensibility--even pain itself almost an alleviation. That is what my life, if you can call it life, was to me through all that term; but, as thought is dumb, though I know the time goes on, how long it goes on I know not. When I next hear human speech, the voices are new and the words strange and barbarous. Also, when I am taken from the wall and turned round to the light, I can see nothing, and I know not why. Perhaps it is all dark here at all times, and they have brought no light. I shall see, though, well enough when I am hanged up under Ganymede, and see my bad old Duke again, and even my other self, my Maddalena. I have a longing on me to see her once more, and to see her more like me, if it may be. It seems so long! So much longer than the time when I was left alone in the _Stanza delle Quattro Corone_. But what you may find hard to understand is this, that though I could not know how long this dreadful waking sleep had been, neither could I be sure it had not been a few hours only. I now know, for I have learned since, that it was over three hundred years. Yet when the end came it found me not without a hope of Maddalena; or if not Maddalena, at least the Duke. But I do not see them, either of them. Nor old Marta Zan and her little dog. Nor the dropsical old _maggiordomo_. That there is no Giacinto is little wonder to me. For I believe him dead, killed by that fell blow on the olive neck I loved so well, just behind the ear. I wonder, though, that I see none of the others. But indeed I have much ado to see anything. All is in a mist of darkness.