. This room, it was clear, lay near to the
sea-shore; for the wind without seemed as if it would tear up the very
foundations of the walls. The old man searched anxiously in his bundle
of keys, and at length applied an old rusty key to the door-lock. Not
without visible signs of anxiety he then proceeded to unlatch the door.
But scarce had he half performed his work, when the storm spared him
the other half by driving in the door and stretching him at his length
upon the floor.

Below them at an immense depth lay the raging sea--luridly illuminated
by the moon which looked out from the storm-rent clouds. The surf sent
upwards a deafening roar, although the raving of the wind seemed to
struggle for the upper hand. This aerial gate led to a little cell
which might not unjustly have been named the house of death. From the
rocky wall, upon which the guard-room stood, ran out at right angles
into the sea a curtain of granite--so narrow that its utmost breadth
hardly amounted to five feet, and resembling an artificial terrace or
corridor that had been thrown by the bold architect across the awful
abyss to a mighty pile of rock that rose like a column from the very
middle of the waves. About a hundred feet from the shore this gallery
terminated in a circular tower, which--if the connecting terrace had
fallen in--would have looked like the work of a magician. This small
corridor appeared the more dreadful, because the raging element below
had long since forced a passage beneath it; and, the breach being
continually widened by the equinoctial storms, it was at length so far
undermined that it seemed to hang like an archway in the air; and the
narrow causeway might now with some propriety be termed a sea-bridge.

Bertram here recognized that part of Walladmor Castle which he had seen
from the deck of the _Fleurs de Lys_.[2]

The rude dragoons even looked out with awe upon the dreadful spectacle
which lay before and below. One of them stepped with folded arms to the
door-way, looked out in silence, and shaking his head said--"So that's
the cage our bird must be carried to?"

"Aye," said the old man, (who had now raised himself from the floor;)
"desperate offenders are always lodged there."

"By G---," replied the dragoon, "at Vittoria I rode down the whole line
of a French battalion that was firing by platoons: there's not a straw
to choose between such service as _that_ and crossing a d---d bridge in
the clouds through a gal