stige still remained, the negro Emperor Christophe, after
fourteen years of absolute rule, had watched for a time the smoke of the
burning of his cane-fields in the plain below, and then, learning that
his bodyguard had deserted him, had gone in and blown out his brains.

He had christened the place after the best of examples, "Sans Souci."

But the citadel above, which was to have been his last defence, he never
used. The defection of his guards made him abandon that. To build it,
they say, cost Hayti thirty thousand lives. He had the true Imperial
lavishness. So high it was, so lost in a wilderness of trees and bush,
looking out over a land relapsed now altogether to a barbarism of patch
and hovel, so solitary and chill under the tropical sky--for even the
guards who still watched over its suspected treasures feared to live in
its ghostly galleries and had made hovels outside its walls--and at the
same time so huge and grandiose--there were walls thirty feet thick,
galleries with scores of rust-eaten cannon, circular dining-halls,
king's apartments and queen's apartments, towering battlements and
great arched doorways--that it seemed to Benham to embody the power and
passing of that miracle of human history, tyranny, the helpless bowing
of multitudes before one man and the transitoriness of such glories,
more completely than anything he had ever seen or imagined in the world
before. Beneath the battlements--they are choked above with jungle grass
and tamarinds and many flowery weeds--the precipice fell away a sheer
two thousand feet, and below spread a vast rich green plain populous and
diversified, bounded at last by the blue sea, like an amethystine wall.
Over this precipice Christophe was wont to fling his victims, and below
this terrace were bottle-shaped dungeons where men, broken and torn,
thrust in at the neck-like hole above, starved and died: it was his
headquarters here, here he had his torture chambers and the means for
nameless cruelties....

"Not a hundred years ago," said Benham's companion, and told the story
of the disgraced favourite, the youth who had offended.

"Leap," said his master, and the poor hypnotized wretch, after one
questioning glance at the conceivable alternatives, made his last
gesture of servility, and then stood out against the sky, swayed, and
with a convulsion of resolve, leapt and shot headlong down through the
shimmering air.

Came presently the little faint sound of his fall