After visiting the terraces I would go into the ruined interior, into the courts, up the stairways and through the empty galleries. I climbed to the old towers and put to flight flocks of pigeons, and disturbed the sleep of bats and owls. On the first floor there was a suite of spacious rooms, still roofed over, and very dark because of the shuttered windows. I penetrated into these chambers, and I felt an almost delicious terror when I heard my footsteps echoing through the sepulchral stillness of the place. Then I would pass in review before the strange Gothic paintings and the half-effaced frescoes that still retained traces of gilt ornamentation; the fabled monsters and garlands of impossible flowers had been added at the time of the Renaissance. This magnificent, pictured past, fantastic and barbarous to the point of being terrible, seemed to me, at that time, very vague and dim and distant; I could not realize that it had been lighted up by the same midday sunshine that warmed the red stones of the ruins about me. And now that I am better able to estimate Castelnau, when I recall it to my memory, after having seen most of the splendors of this earth, I still think the enchanted castle of my childhood, as it stands upon its glorious height, one of the most superb ruins of mediaeval France. In one of the towers there was a room whose ceiling was painted a royal blue over-strewn with exquisite gold tracery and blazonry. In no place have I realized feudalism so well as in that tower. There alone, in the silence as of a city of the dead, I would lean out of the little window cut in the thick wall and contemplate the green verdure lying below me, and I tried to imagine that I saw coming along the paths, given over to the flight of birds, a cavalcade of soldiers, or a procession of noble knights and ladies. . . . And, for me, reared in a level country, one of the greatest charms of the place was the view I had of blue distances visible from every loophole and crevice, every gap and opening in the rooms and towers of Castelnau, for then I realized its extraordinary height. CHAPTER XLVI. My brother's letters, written close on very fine paper, continued to reach us from time to time; he could only send them to us by sailing vessels bound in our direction which lay-to in that part of the world where he was stationed. Some of them were written particularly for me, and these were long, and filled with never-to-be-forgotten descriptions. I already knew several words of the sweet and liquid language of Oceanica, and often in my dreams I saw the exquisite island he described and roamed over it; it haunted my imagination as does a chimerical realm, ardently desired, but as inaccessible as if situated upon another planet.