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To their great disappointment, the river banks were deserted a few old tracks showed where a herd of bulls had some time before passed along, but not a horn nor hump was to be seen in the sterile landscape. A few antelopes looked down upon them from the brow of a crag, but flitted away out of sight at the least approach of the hunter.
It was with the utmost grief of heart that the good master of Santiago beheld his brave men falling like helpless victims around him, without the means of resistance or revenge. The confusion of his followers was increased by the shouts of the Moors multiplied by the echoes of every crag and cliff, as if they were surrounded by innumerable foes.
At length a black and frowning rock rose before them, surmounted by a gloomy fortress. As he caught sight of this dismal crag, Monte-Cristo knitted his brows and through his clenched teeth muttered an imprecation upon the tyranny of man. "What is it that so moves you, father?" asked Zuleika, in a soft voice, gazing solicitously into his face.
We were now among rocks; we climbed cliffs and descended them, and advanced sometimes with our feet on narrow ledges, holding tightly on to other ledges by our fingers; sometimes, cautiously balanced, we moved along edges of rock with precipices on both sides. Once, in getting round a crag, Lauener shook a book from his pocket; it was arrested by a rock about sixty or eighty feet below us.
Robin stood for a moment at the porch, and heard the booming of cannon heavily passing through the air, traversing the low downs, and roaring from crag to crag, as if rejoicing in liberty; the ships that lay out at sea sent forth a reply, and in a moment their flags were waving in the wind. Robin returned for a moment to his mother's room.
"I was as close to the troopers as I am to you, though they saw me not, and their entire talk was of the Gull's Nest, and how they were all to be down here soon after sunrise; and a deal of jokes, in their own way, they passed upon it stiff dry jokes, that were as hard to swallow as a poker." "Ha, ha!" laughed the smuggler; "how they will pray when they see the crag dancing in the air!
Passing the tide-rip Charybdis, a meeting of currents, which called only for another hand at the wheel; and the castled crag of naughty Scylla, whose town has grown prodigiously, we bade adieu to the 'tower of Pelorus. Then we shaped our course for the Islands of AEolus, or the Winds, and the Lipari archipelago, all volcanic cones whose outlines were misty as Ossian's spectres.
"Old Hapsburg Castle is a mere hawks' crag, as its name implies, and the half-score of mountain peaks my father lost with it are not worth the life of his humblest subject. He loves his people, and would not shed their blood to soothe his wounded pride. The man who makes war should fight in the front rank." "There is where I fight, young sir," returned Charles.
The echo of the cable, as the men began to heave it, left the Consul's conjecture no longer chimerical; and after a little while, the flash and report of another gun leaped one after the other, from crag to crag, through the dusk of evening, and whirling above our heads, bounded over the summit of the mountain. "Come, there's no doubt now," observed the Consul, turning round towards me.
This high land was as still now as a sheltered valley, a tuft of springy grass stood out on the crag as stiff as a thin plume; and the silence, as at Padley two weeks ago, was marked rather than broken by the tinkle of water from his spring fifty yards away. The air was cold and fresh and marvellously scented, after the rain, with the clean smell of strong turf and rushes.
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