She cried in a terrified voice: “Oh, _mon Dieu_! hold me, or I sink!” and committed herself shuddering to my embrace. The blackness was blind, horrible, beyond reason. We could only shut our eyes and whisper to one another, expecting and hoping for Gusman’s return. But he came no more that night, and by-and-by Carinne slept in my arms. * * * * * * * The glare of torch-light on my face brought me to my senses. That sombre deadman, as Carinne called him, stood above us--visionless, without movement, it seemed--a lurid genii presented in a swirling drift of smoke. He might never have moved from the spot since we had last seen him there. “Why dost thou wake us, good friend?” said I. “Hast thou a midnight service for the dead here?” “It is high morning,” said he, in a voice like a funeral bell. “Morning!” I sat up in amazement. Truly I had not thought of it. We had slept the clock round; but there was no day in this hideous and melancholy underworld. I looked down at my companion. She had slipped from my hold of her, and lay across my knees. Her hair curled low on her forehead; her eyelids were misted with a faint blue shadow, like the sheaths of hyacinth buds before they open; her lips were a little parted, as Love had left them. _Mon Dieu!_ there is no sight so tender and so pathetic as that of a fair child asleep; and what was Carinne but a child! In an access of emotion I bent and softly touched the lips with mine. This infant so brave and so forlorn, whose head should have been pillowed on flowers, whose attendants should have been the lady fairies! “She is very pretty,” said the deadman. “Ha, ha!” I cried. “Hast thou found it out? There shall spring a blossom for thee yet, old Gusman, in this lifeless city of thine!” He twirled his torch for the first time, so that it spouted fire like a hand-grenade. “Blossoms!” he barked. “But thou shalt know I have my garden walks down here--bowers of mildew, parterres of fine rank funguses, royal worms even, that have battened for centuries on the seed of men.” He crooked his knees, so that he might stare into my face. “Not altogether a city of the dead,” said he. “Is it peopled with ghosts, then?” “Very thickly, without doubt. Thou shalt see them swarm like maggots in its streets.” I shrugged my shoulders. The creature stood erect once more, and made a comprehensive gesture. “This?” he said,--“you must not judge by this. It is the Holy of Holies, to which none has access but the High Priest of the Catacombs--and such as he favours.” “And what, in a rude age, keeps it sacred?” He swept his torch right and left. “Look, then!” said he. We lay in a vaulted chamber hewn out of the rock. On all sides I fancied I caught dim vision of the mouths of innumerable low tunnels that exhaled a mist of profound night.