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"Aye," she said with a sigh, "there is truth in that last." The torch had filled the captain's room with a resinous smoke, but the flame was growing pale. Dawn was coming in greyly through a slender arrow-slit, and with it ever and again the glow from some mountain out of sight, which was shooting forth spasmodic bursts of fire.
I saw no living thing within; naught was there but bones. Cutting me a green measuring-rod, I once more dived within the skeleton. From their arrow-slit in the skull, the priests perceived me taking the altitude of the final rib, "How now!" they shouted; "Dar'st thou measure this our god! That's for us." "Aye, priests well, how long do ye make him, then?"
'Now I must get everything ready, and order what she will want, as Mrs. Goodman is away. What will she want? Dinner would be best she has had no lunch, I know; or tea perhaps, and dinner at the usual time. Still, if she has had no lunch Hark, what do I hear? She ran to an arrow-slit, and Somerset, who had also heard something, looked out of an adjoining one.
Peering cautiously through the arrow-slit, and favoured by the fact that Gonzaga's back was towards him, he saw that he was no more than in time. The courtier was bending down, and by the creaking sound that reached him Ercole guessed his occupation to be the winding of the arbalest string. On the table at his side lay a quarrel swathed in a sheet of paper.
I saw no living thing within; naught was there but bones. Cutting me a green measuring-rod, I once more dived within the skeleton. From their arrow-slit in the skull, the priests perceived me taking the altitude of the final rib, "How now!" they shouted; "Dar'st thou measure this our god! That's for us." "Aye, priests well, how long do ye make him, then?"
He lifted his eyes to the nearest loophole, through which the setting sun had been darting its rays a moment before. Morty O'Beirne bending almost double for outside, the arrow-slit was not more than two feet from the ground was peering in. "Ye'll not have changed your quarters, Colonel," he said, in a tone of raillery which was assumed perhaps to hide a real feeling of shame.
Apparently here was a man whose brains had not been reduced to an ineffectual mush by idiotic training. I set him loose and sent him to the Factory. Some of the cells carved in the living rock were just behind the face of the precipice, and in each of these an arrow-slit had been pierced outward to the daylight, and so the captive had a thin ray from the blessed sun for his comfort.
When in the twilight Sir Lancelot awoke, he found himself on a straw pallet in a strange room, and he leaped up and went to a narrow arrow-slit in the wall and looked out. Before him for a great distance was a black watery land, with the sun sinking far away on the very edge, and the pools of the marsh were as if they were of blood.
Through one of the arrow-slit windows of my tree-house I could see far away a great mountain top whitened with perpetual snow, which our Lord the Sun dyed with blood every night of His setting. Night after night I used to watch that ruddy light with wide straining eyes.
The case of one of these poor fellows was particularly hard. From his dusky swallow's hole high up in that vast wall of native rock he could peer out through the arrow-slit and see his own home off yonder in the valley; and for twenty-two years he had watched it, with heartache and longing, through that crack.
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