self know what he had said besides, for there was wildness and
confusion in his spirit. They arrived at the Rocks of the Moon, and
mounted up to the stone fortress. The castellan, an old, gloomy man,
the more devoted to the young knight from his dark melancholy and wild
deeds, hastened to lower the drawbridge. Greetings were exchanged in
silence, and in silence did Sintram enter, and those joyless gates
closed with a crash behind the future recluse.

CHAPTER 20

Yes truly, a recluse, or at least something like it, did poor Sintram
now become! For towards the time of the approaching Christmas festival
his fearful dreams came over him, and seized him so fiercely, that all
the esquires and servants fled with shrieks out of the castle, and would
never venture back again. No one remained with him except Rolf and the
old castellan. After a while, indeed, Sintram became calm, but he went
about looking so pallid and still that he might have been taken for a
wandering corpse. No comforting of the good Rolf, no devout soothing
lays, were of any avail; and the castellan, with his fierce, scarred
features, his head almost entirely bald from a huge sword-cut, his
stubborn silence, seemed like a yet darker shadow of the miserable
knight. Rolf often thought of going to summon the holy chaplain of
Drontheim; but how could he have left his lord alone with the gloomy
castellan, a man who at all times raised in him a secret horror? Biorn
had long had this wild strange warrior in his service, and honoured him
on account of his unshaken fidelity and his fearless courage, though
neither the knight nor any one else knew whence the castellan came, nor,
indeed, exactly who he was. Very few people knew by what name to
call him; but that was the more needless, since he never entered into
discourse with any one. He was the castellan of the stone fortress on
the Rocks of the Moon, and nothing more.

Rolf committed his deep heartfelt cares to the merciful God, trusting
that he would soon come to his aid; and the merciful God did not fail
him. For on Christmas eve the bell at the drawbridge sounded, and Rolf,
looking over the battlements, saw the chaplain of Drontheim standing
there, with a companion indeed that surprised him,--for close beside him
appeared the crazy pilgrim, and the dead men's bones on his dark mantle
shone very strangely in the glimmering starlight: but the sight of the
chaplain filled the good Rolf too full of joy to l