How thy spirit mounted aloft, like a lightning-flash darting upward toward heaven, when the great Night, with her saintly halo of stars, stood erect before thee!--Beneath the heavens there is no terror, only under the earth!--Broad shadows lay across his road to Elysium, which on Sunday had been colored with dew-drops and butterflies. In the distance fiery prongs grew out of the earth and moved along;--it was the hearse with the torches in the lower road. When he came to the cross-way which leads through the ruined castle into Tartarus, he looked round toward the enchanted grove, on whose winding bridge life and songs of joy had met him; all was dumb therein, and only a long gray bird of prey (probably a paper dragon) wheeled over it to and fro. He passed through the old castle into an orchard that had been sawed down, and looked like a tree-churchyard; then into a pale wood, full of peeled May-trees, which with faded ribbons and banners all looked toward Elysium,--a withered pleasure grove of so many happy days. Some windmills, with their long shadow-arms, struck into the midst, and were continually seizing and vanishing. Impetuously Albano ran down a stairway darkened with hangings, and came upon an old battle-field,--a gloomy waste with a black wall, of which the monotony was broken only by white gypsum heads, which stood in the earth as if they were on the point of sinking or of resurrection; a tower full of blind gates and blind windows stood in the midst, and the solitary clock talked with itself therein, and, with its iron rod swaying to and fro, seemed fain to divide the wave of time, which ever tended to run together again: it struck three quarters to twelve, and deep in the wood the echo murmured as if in sleep, and softly spake once more to fleeting man of fleeting time. The road ran in an eternal circle round about the churchyard wall, without coming to a gate. Alban must, according to his information, seek a spot in the wall where it roared and reeled under him. At last he stepped upon a stone which sank with him; then a section of the wall fell down; and a tangled wood, full of clumps of trees, whose stems twined together into bush-work, intercepted every beam of the moon. As he looked round him under the gate, there hung over the shadowy stairway a pale head like a bust of the murder-field, and passed down without a body, and the bloodless dead seemed to awake and run after it;--the cold hellstone[116] of horror contracted his heart: he stood: the death's-head hovered immovable over the last step!