The light rapidly increased and soon became bright enough to enable him to see, or rather to divine, in a vague blending of light and shadow, the outline of a room on the ground floor, as large as that in which he was, but evidently much higher before the crumbling of the intermediate floors, as he could judge by the spring of the arched ceiling which rested upon bases embellished with fanciful human and animal figures, much larger and protruding farther than those he had previously seen on the stairway. The only furniture consisted of several piles of dry forage, and boards arranged as a barrier near one end, with the broken remains of a number of mangers. The room had been used for a long time as a stable for cattle. Among the boards could be seen pieces of yokes and ploughshares. Then all these things were shrouded in shadow once more, and the light, ascending, struck the great stretch of wall which formed the gable end of the building, and which was directly opposite the marquis, some forty feet in height. This light, now pale, now reddish, came from an invisible flame placed under the ceiling of the ground-floor apartment--that is to say, under that part of it which had not fallen, corresponding to that from which the marquis watched this gloomy, flickering tableau. Suddenly there was a noise of doors closing, footsteps and voices under that ceiling, and a confused mass of moving shadows, sometimes of enormous size, sometimes stunted as it were, was thrown in the most curious fashion on the high wall, as if a great number of persons were passing back and forth in front of a great fire. "This is a very strange game of hide-and-seek," thought the marquis, "and it is impossible to deny that this château is filled with wandering, chattering ghosts. Let us hear what they say." He listened, but he could not succeed in distinguishing a single phrase, a word, a syllable, amid a loud murmur of words, songs, groans and laughter. The appalling resonance of the arched ceiling, which hurled the sounds like shadows against the opposite wall, blended all the voices in a single one--all the words in a confused murmur. The marquis was not deaf, but he had the sensitive hearing peculiar to old men, who can hear very distinctly sounds that are moderately loud and words clearly articulated, but whom an uproar, a hurly-burly of voices disturbs and confuses to no purpose. Thus he distinguished intonations, nothing more: sometimes that of a hoarse, loud voice, which seemed to be telling a story; sometimes the refrain of a ballad abruptly interrupted by threatening accents; and then a loud voice which seemed to ridicule and imitate the others, and which raised a tempest of uproarious and brutal laughter. Sometimes there were long monologues, then dialogues between two or three, and suddenly shouts of anger or merriment which resembled roars. Indeed, it might be that those people were speaking a language which the marquis did not know.