With such fears on his mind, he hesitated no longer to remove his cousin and her companion to the ravine; which was effected with but little risk or difficulty, the ravine heading, as was mentioned before, under the floor of the hovel itself, and its borders being so strewn with broken timbers and planks, as to screen the party from observation. He concealed them both among the rocks and brambles with which the hollow abounded, listened a moment to the rush of the flood as it swept the precipitous bank, and the roar with which it seemed struggling among rocky obstructions above, and smiling with the grim thought, that, when resistance was no longer availing, there was yet a refuge for his kinswoman within the dark bosom of those troubled waters, to which he felt, with the stern resolution of a Roman father rather than of a Christian lover, that he could, when nothing else remained, consign her with his own hands, he returned to the ruins, to keep up the appearance of still defending it, and to preserve the entrance of the ravine. CHAPTER XVI. The flaming arrows were still shot in vain at the water-soaked roof, and the combustibles with which they were armed, burning out very rapidly, produced hut little of that effect in illuminating the ruins which Roland had apprehended, and for which they had been perhaps in part designed; and, in consequence, the savages soon ceased to shoot them. A more useful ally to the besiegers was promised in the moon, which was now rising over the woods, and occasionally revealing her wan and wasted crescent through gaps in the clouds. Waning in her last quarter, and struggling amid banks of vapour, she yet retained sufficient, magnitude and lustre, when risen a few more degrees, to dispel the almost sepulchral darkness that had hitherto invested the ruins, and thus proved a more effectual protection to the travellers than their own courage. Of this Roland was well aware; and he watched the increasing light with sullen and gloomy forebodings; though still exhorting his two supporters to hope and courage, and setting them a constant example of vigilance and resolution. But neither hope nor courage, neither vigilance nor resolution, availed to deprive the foe of the advantage he had gained in effecting a lodgment among the ruins, where four or five different warriors still maintained a hot fire upon the hovel, doing, of course, little harm, as it was entirely deserted, but threatening mischief enough, when it should fall into their hands,--a catastrophe that was deferred only in consequence of the extreme cautiousness with which they now conducted hostilities, the travellers making only a show of defending it, though sensible that it almost entirely commanded the ravine.