He positively saw Lisalda twined about the body of his rival. His hair (he felt it) was turning grey. He saw the cabalist (a wonder of satiety) remove that ring of rings from his finger and fit it jestingly upon hers. At this precise juncture of his nightmare, Ataurresagasti suddenly started broad awake to his feet. Dream or no dream--whatever the rest of the night had been--there was certainly now something awful in progress in the adjoining apartment. Something (which he instinctively felt was not human) was struggling for life and death with the luckless cabalist. The hair of the sailor stood on end. There was no mistake about it this time. Time had been when he fancied he felt fear, but he knew now that only at this moment had he learnt its kind. All at once a most terrible shriek rang out through every corner of the house. Ataurresagasti dashed the partition into splinters with a blow that would have shattered steel. He leaped into the room just in time to arrest the escape of some huge incredible beast, that stood sullenly at bay, in the strangling streak of dawn. The mystery was solved. Down came the hanger with an impulse so irresistible that it sheared off a whole limb of the accursed one. The point of the hanger actually penetrated so deeply into the flooring that it was a moment of anxiety (during which his quarry, although maimed, might have bested him) before Ataurresagasti succeeded in getting it out again. But when he had recovered it, the animal had disappeared, impossible to find out how or where. This alone he saw in the imperfect light (or rather in the imperfect darkness) that the whole room was scattered from end to end with blood and bones and brain, which was all that was left of that most unhappy man.