All at once his heart sucked in warm blood again; he turned toward the misshapen wood with drawn sword, because he was bearing along his life in his hand near armed Death. He followed in the darkness of the moss-green towers the roar of the subterranean flood and the rocking of the ground. Unfortunately he looked round again, and there stood the death's-head behind him still, but high in the air on the trunk of a giant. The extreme of horror always drove him with compressed eyes full upon a phantom; he called twice through the echoing wood, "Who's there?" But when, at this moment, a second head seemed all at once to stand beside the first, then his hand clove, frozen, to the ice-cold key of the gate of the world of the dead, and he tore it away bleeding. He fled, and plunged through thicker and thicker twigs, till at last he came out into an open garden and into the splendor of the moon; here, ah here, when he saw the holy, immortal heavens and the rich stars in the north gleaming again, which never rise nor set, the pole-star and Friederich's-Ehre,[117] the Bear and the Serpent, and Charles's Wain and Cassiopæa, which looked down upon him mildly, as if with the bright winking eyes of eternal spirits, then his spirit asked itself, "Who can lay hands on me? I am a spirit among spirits"; and the courage of immortality beat again in his warm breast. But what a singular garden! Great and little flowerless beds, full of yew, rue, and rosemary, divided it among them; a circle of weeping birches drooped like a funeral train around the mute spot; under the garden murmured the buried brook, and in the middle stood a white altar, near which lay a man. Albano was strengthened by the appearance of the common dress and the mechanic's bundle on which the sleeper rested; he stepped quite close to him, and read the golden inscription of the altar: "Take my last offering, all-gracious one!" The heart of the Prince must here be mouldering in the altar. Ah, after these rigid scenes, it soothed his soul even to tears to find here human words and a human sleep, and the remembrance of God; but as he looked with emotion at the sleeper, suddenly that sister's voice which he had heard on Isola Bella said softly in his ear, "I give thee Linda de Romeiro." "Ah, good God!" he cried, and turned round; and there was nothing on either side of him, and he held himself up by the corner of the altar. "I give thee Linda de Romeiro," it said again; frightfully the thought seized him, that the hovering death's-head might be speaking near him, and he shook the sound sleeper, who woke not, and shook and called still more violently, when the voice spake for a third time. "What?" said the drowsy man, "directly! What will he?--you?" and raised himself reluctantly and with a yawn; but at the sight of the naked sword fell down on his knees, and said: "Mercy! I will, indeed, give up all!"