The drums were still ringing in her ears; and this familiar sound, like the voices of old friends, caused her now to weep plentifully. Once again she turned to the bed where Denzil lay so pale and still, his sharpened features acutely defined in the last light of the sun; and she felt in her heart as she pressed her interlaced hands on her lips, seeking to crush down emotion-- "So the dream it is fled, and the day it is done, And my lips still murmur the name of one Who will never come back to me!" CHAPTER XXI. THE PURSUIT. The same evening of this event saw the Union Jack floating on the summit of the Bala Hissar, and our troops in or around Cabul, in the narrow and once-crowded thoroughfares of which--even in the spacious and once-brilliant bazaar--the most desolate silence prevailed. The houses of Sir Alexander Burnes, of Sir William Macnaghten, and all other British residents were now mere heaps of ashes, and their once-beautiful gardens were waste. Human bones lay in some; whose they were none knew, but they remained among the parterres of flowers as terrible mementos of the past. Having, among many other trophies, the magnificent and ancient gates of Hindoo Somnath with them, the victorious troops of General Nott were encamped around the stately marble tomb of the Emperor Baber, where the British were watering their horses at the Holy Well, quietly cooking their rations of fat-tailed dhoombas or of beef, newly shot, flayed, and cut up, after a long route; and the natives were gravely boiling their rice and otta; while the staff officers, Generals Pollock, Sale, Nott, Macaskill, and others, some on foot and some on horseback, were in deep conference about a map of Western India, and Bokhara, and as to where the hostages were, and what was to be done for their relief, if they still lived. Waller, who in his energy and anxiety had come on with the advanced guard of cavalry, looked around him with peculiar sadness. Save Doctor Brydone and one or two others, he alone seemed to survive of all the original Cabul force; and every feature of the place before him was full of melancholy memories and suggestions of those he could never see again, and of the past that could come no more. To Sir Richmond Shakespere, his new friend, he could not resist the temptation of speaking affectionately and regretfully of the dead, and the places associated with them. He found a relief to his mind in doing so.