"Stelio!"
He heard that cry full of anguish, and hastened his search along the winding paths that first seemed to lead him toward the tower and then away from it. The laughter had frozen in his heart. His whole soul shook to its foundation every time his name reached him, uttered by that invisible agony. And the gradual lessening of the light brought up an image of blood that is flowing away, of slowly fading life.
"I am here! I am here!"
One of the paths brought him at last to the open space where the tower stood. He ran furiously up the winding stairs, felt dizzy when he reached the top, closed his eyes while grasping the railing, opened them again, and saw a long zone of fire on the horizon, the disk of the rayless moon, the gray plain, and the labyrinth below him, black and spotted with box-bush and horn-beam, narrow in its endless convolutions, looking like a dismantled edifice covered with wild vines.
"Stop! Stop! Do not run like that! Some one has heard me. A man is coming. I can see him coming. Wait! Stop!"
He watched the woman turning and running like a mad creature along the dark, delusive paths, like something condemned to vain torture, to some useless but eternal fatigue, like a sister of the fabulous martyrs.
"Stop!"
It seemed that she did not hear him, or that she could not control her fatal agitation, and that he could not rescue her, but must always remain there, a witness of that terrible chastisement.
"Here he is!"
One of the keepers had heard their cries, had approached them, and now entered by the gateway. Stelio met him at the foot of the tower, and together they hastened to find the lost woman. The man knew the secret of the labyrinth, and Stelio prevented any chatter and jests by surprising him with his generosity.
"Has she lost consciousness—has she fallen?" The darkness and the silence were sinister, and he felt alarmed. She did not answer when he called her, and he could not hear her footsteps. Night had already fallen on the place, and a damp veil was descending from the purple sky.
"Shall I find her in a swoon upon the ground," he thought.
He started at seeing a mysterious figure appear at a turning, with a pale face that attracted all the last rays of daylight, white as a pearl, with large, fixed eyes, and lips closely compressed.
They turned back toward the Dolo, taking the same route beside the Brenta. She never spoke, never opened her lips, never answered, as if she could not unclose her teeth. She lay in the bottom of the carriage, wrapped in her cloak, and now and then she shook with a deep shudder, as one attacked by malarial fever. Her friend tried to take her hands in his to warm them, but in vain—theywere inert and lifeless. And as they drove along, the statues passed and passed beside them.
The river flowed black between its banks, under the purple and silver sky; the moon was rising. A black boat came down the stream, towed by two gray horses with heavy hoofs, led by a man who whistled cheerfully, and the funnel smoked on the deck like a chimney on a hut. The yellow light of a lantern flashed, and the odor of supper floated on the air; and here and there, as they drove along, the statues passed and passed beside them.
It was like a Stygian landscape, like a vision of Hades, a region of shadows, mist, and water. Everything grew misty and vanished like spirits. The moon enchanted and attracted the plain, as it enchants and attracts the water, absorbing the vapors of earth with insatiable, silent thirst. Solitary pools shone everywhere; small, silvery canals were visible, glittering at uncertain distances. Earth seemed to be gradually losing its solidity, and the sky seemed to regard its own melancholy reflected in innumerable placid mirrors.
And here and there, along the banks of the stream, like the ghosts of a people disappeared, the statues passed and passed!