lowest
foundations.

Again there was silence, which seemed even deeper after the bronze
thunders; the cooing of the pigeons could again be heard, and, down in
the garden, the twittering of the birds, warmed by the sun's rays that
began to gild its cool twilight.

Gabriel felt himself deeply moved; the sweet silence, the absolute
calm, the feeling almost of non-existence overpowered him; and beyond
those walls was the world, but here it could not be seen, it could not
be felt; it remained respectful but indifferent before that monument
of the past, that splendid sepulchre, in whose interior nothing
excited its curiosity. Who would ever imagine he was there? That
growth of seven centuries, built by vanished greatness for a dying
faith, should be his last refuge. In the full tide of unbelief the
church should be his sanctuary, as it had been in former days to
those great criminals of the Middle Ages, who, from the height of the
cloister mocked at justice, detained at the doors like the beggars.
Here should be consummated in silence and calm the slow decay of his
body, here he would die with the serene satisfaction of having died to
the world long before. At last he realised his hope of ending his days
in a corner of the sleepy Spanish Cathedral, the only hope that had
sustained him as he wandered on foot along the highways of Europe,
hiding himself from the civil guards and the police, spending his
nights in ditches, huddled up, his head on his knees, fearing every
moment to die of cold.

He clung to the Cathedral as a shipwrecked and drowning man clings
to the spar of a sinking ship; this had been his hope, and he was
beginning to realise it. The church would receive him, like an old and
infirm mother, unable to smile, but who could still stretch out her
arms.

"At last! At last!" murmured Luna.

And he smiled, thinking of the world of sorrows and persecutions that
he was leaving behind him, as though he were going to some remote
place, situated in another planet, from which he would never return;
the Cathedral would shelter him for ever.

In the profound stillness of the cloister, that the sound of the
street could not reach, the "companion" Luna thought he heard far off,
very far off, the shrill sound of a trumpet and the muffled roll
of drums, then he remembered the Alcazar of Toledo, dominating the
Cathedral from its height, intimidating it with the enormous mass of
its towers; they were the drums and trumpet