d be sought
for there when dead.

I was at the window, as I told myself these things, looking out into the
_patio_, where the palms, and the shell which was the upper basin of the
fountain, were faintly definable in starlight. Robbed of my watch, the
only way I had of calculating time after nightfall was by the silence
which came about an hour after sunset. Then the gurgling voice of hidden
water (which sang underground in this secluded _patio_ as everywhere in
the Albaicin, and on the Alhambra hill) abruptly ceased, after a distant
ringing which I took to be that of the bell in the Torre de la Vela,
regulating the irrigation of all the country round. At this same moment
the diamond plumes of the fountain invariably fell, and disappeared, not
to wave again until the morning sun was up.

I was always sorry when the fountain died, for it was the sole companion
of my captivity, my one dim pleasure watching its nymph-like play. And
to-night the dead silence of the _patio_ seemed the lull before my own
death.

It must have been, I thought, somewhere about ten o'clock when I heard a
new sound in the court, slight, elusive, but distinct. Chink--chink--like
metal on stone, as if a troll were mining underground. The old man was
taking time by the forelock, I said grimly to myself, getting ready a
place in some cellar to lay me away when I should be finished. I should
last some days yet; but it took time to do these things well. At the hotel
they had told me how a year or two ago, in destroying an old house in the
Albaicin to build a new one on the sight, workmen had come across the
skeletons of two French grenadiers neatly sealed up in a wall of stone,
where they had kept guard since the time of the Peninsular War. Probably a
night or two had been needed for the making of their niche.

Chink--chink! Yes, the old wretch must be at work in a cellar. The noise
certainly came from underground; and it was not as agreeable to my ears as
the tinkle of the vanished fountain. I wished the hour would come for the
water to leap up and drown that other stealthy sound.

Suddenly, as I turned a wistful gaze on the alabaster shell dimly
glimmering among the low palms, to my astonishment it seemed to totter. I
thought that it must be a mere illusion of weary eyes, or that the effect
was created by a cloud obscuring the starlight. But again the white shell
moved against the dark green background, this time swaying from side to
side.

Coul