The lurid glare blazed up balefully amongst the spars and rigging, lighting up the decks, and blasting the crew into the likeness of the host of Sennacherib, when the day broke on them, and they were all dead corpses. A--stem of us, indistinct from the distance, the white Moro Castle reappeared, and rose frowning, tier above tier, like a Tower of Babel, with its summit veiled in the clouds, and the startled sea-fowl wheeling above the higher batteries, like snowflakes blown about in storm; while, near at hand, the rocks on each side of us looked as if fresh splintered asunder, with the sulphurous flames which had split them still burning; the trees looked no longer green, but were sicklied o’er with a pale ashy colour, as if sheeted ghosts were holding their midnight orgies amongst their branches-cranes, and waterfowl, and birds of many kinds, and all the insect and reptile tribes, their gaudy noontide colours merged into one and the same fearful deathlike sameness, flitted and sailed and circled above us, and chattered, and screamed, and shrieked; and the unearthly-looking guanas, and numberless creeping things, ran out on the boughs to peer at us, and a large snake twined itself up a scathed stump that shot out from a shattered pinnacle of rock that overhung us, with its glossy skin, glancing like the brazen serpent set up by Moses in the camp of the Israelites; and the cattle on the beetling summit of the cliff craned over the precipitous ledge to look down upon us; and while every thing around us and above us was thus glancing in the blue and ghastly radiance, the band struck up a low moaning air; the light burnt out, and once more we were cast, by the contrast, into even more palpable darkness than before. I was entranced, and stood with folded arms, looking forth into the night, and musing intensely on the appalling scene which had just vanished like a feverish dream--“Dinner waits, sir,” quoth Mafame. “Oh! I am coming;” and kicking all my romance to Old Nick, I descended, and we had a pleasant night of it, and some wine and some fun, and there an end--but I have often dreamed of that dark pool, and the scenes I witnessed there that day and night. CHAPTER XIII.--The Pirate’s Leman “When lovely woman stoops to folly, And finds too late that men betray, What charm can soothe her melancholy, What art can wash her guilt away?” “The only art her guilt can cover, To hide her shame from every eye, To give repentance to her lover, And wring his bosom, is to die.” --Oliver Goldsmith, “Song” From The Vicar Of Wakefield. “Ay Dios, si sera possible que he ya hallado lugar que pueda servir de escondida sepultura a la carga pesada deste cuerpo, que tan contra mi voluntad sostengo?” --Don Quixote De La Mancha.