Another instant, and I knew why. We were descending stairs--on the way down, doubtless, to some exit that should lead to my place of doom! Still I resisted not. One path to oblivion served as well as another.
By the manner in which the steps were cut I knew at once that we were in some tower, and that the stairs were circular; also my hand, which I kept against the side, told me the same thing. Moreover, there were _[oe]illets_, or arrow slits, in the wall, through which I could see the moon shining on another wall, which seemed to be some fifty paces off--probably, I thought, the opposite wall of some courtyard built into, or by the side of, the huge ramparts.
Of sound there was none, no noise of any kind, no tramp of sentry to be heard, although I knew well enough that on the ramparts themselves soldiers were kept constantly on guard. Nothing; all as still as death, the death to which I was being led.
At last the stairs ended. My feet told me we were on the level now, a level into which they sank somewhat as I took step after step, whereby I judged that we were walking on sand, and wondered in what part of that prison, of those huge ramparts, we might be. Surely, I thought, some lowermost vault or dungeon, perhaps beneath the foundations of the structure, beneath the rocks between which the river flowed.
"My God!" I murmured to myself, "is this my fate? To be immured forever in some dark dungeon in the bowels of the earth, where neither light, nor sound--never hope--can come again. Better death at once, swift and merciful, than this. Far better."
Yet almost it seemed to my now frighted heart that this alone could be the case.
The air reeked and was clammy, as though with long confinement in this underground place, and by remaining ever unrefreshed from without by heaven's pure breezes was mawkish and sickly as the breath of a charnel house--perhaps 'twas one!--perhaps those who died here were left to fester and moulder away till their corpses turned to skeletons and their skeletons to dust; to die here, where no cry for help could issue forth, no more than any sound except a muffled one could penetrate, as I knew at this moment, for far above I heard a deep boom that seemed like the muffled roar of a cannon--a sound that was in truth the eternal bell of the cathedral telling the hour; also another broke on my ear--a swift, rushing noise, yet deadened, too--the sound, I thought, of the Minho passing near.