When consciousness came back to Denzil he found himself alone--alone with the dead. He knew not what time had elapsed since he had been struck down by the treacherous wretch whose life he had sought to save; and no vestige of the retreating troops remained, save those whose bodies dotted all the wintry waste. Angrily and sadly the rising wind howled from the mountain pass, blowing before it over the frozen snow the long leaves of the coss, or dead grass, the fir cones and pistachio nuts from the thickets close by; and some of these cones, that fall from the jelgoozeh, or mountain pine, are larger than artichokes. The dark and tortuous pass had apparently swallowed all his comrades; yet through it now his way must lie, and, staggering up, he strove to follow the blood-stained track; but the landscape, the mountains, the abandoned cannon, dead horses, camels, and bodies of soldiers, of the Hindoo dhooley-wallahs, and of many women, seemed all to whirl round him, and he nearly fell on the snow once more. Benumbed as he was, stiff and cold in every limb, with a dull crushing sense of pain in the back region of his head, from which the blood, now crusted and frozen, had flowed freely, he felt that he could only remain there and wait for death or succour, the former too surely, for already the gloom of evening seemed to be setting over the mountains, and he looked about him wildly and despairingly. He had been in love, and had lost hope; but he was in love yet, and had lost his mistress, which was sadder still, and was now likely to lose his life. The bodies of several men of his company lay near, all mostly in attitudes expressive of the agony in which they had expired, with their wan and ghastly faces turned to the winter sky; but the body of General Trecarrel was gone; at least, he could nowhere see it. Had Polwhele and Sergeant Treherne succeeded in removing it? If so, why was he left to his wretched fate? Or had a wolf--but that idea was too repugnant, and he shrunk from it. An European woman, young and pretty, in her night-dress (as many ladies were who left the cantonments in litters), lay half in and half out of a dhooley, from the bed within which she had apparently been escaping when overtaken, and the snow was falling alike on her white bare breast and the pale face of the little babe she had been in the act of nourishing when the bullet of some relentless Ghilzie had slain her; so her child must have soon followed. It was a piteous sight; and let those who have seen death amid all the hushed solemnity of a sick chamber in a land of peace imagine such a scene as this, and death under auspices so horrible and revolting.