n, some
little offshoot from the main settlement by the Albaicin. The door which I
reached first was closed. No one stood waiting, but I opened it and went
in.

A faint light, cast by a small paraffin lamp set in a niche hollowed out
of the whitewashed rock, made darkness visible in a tiny room with a rough
earthen floor. A red calico curtain at the far end signified a second
cave-room beyond. No one was visible, no one answered when I spoke, and I
sat down to wait on a dilapidated rush-bottomed chair which stood with its
back to the red curtain.

After that, nothing.

And then, dreams.

There was one dream about a room, a large room it seemed to be, shadowy in
the corners, and with walls where Christian and Moorish warriors fought in
tapestry, leaping off sometimes on their stallions, and spurring back into
place again.

In the room was a great bed with dark silk curtains. A man lay in it, but
suddenly sat up, and looked eagerly at something which seemed to be
myself, dead or dying. But I did not care. I knew who he was, and that we
hated each other for some reason which I could not remember, but it was
impossible to recall his name. That was twisted up in a thousand skeins of
silk; or was it a woman's yellow hair?

The man exclaimed, "Good--very good," more than once to someone I could not
see. Then he said, when the someone else had spoken, "Only keep him till
after I'm married. I don't care what you do with him after that. Fling him
into a well, or let him go. Either way he can never find out or prove
anything troublesome."

This was all of that part of the dream, though there was another which
came soon after, and was somehow connected with it. It was a dream about a
long dark passage, which smelled like a cellar, and I was being dragged
through it by two voices, a thing which did not appear at all out of the
ordinary, though it was disagreeable.

After that, concrete thoughts were lost in one tremendous throbbing ache,
which was in the back of my head at first, but spread slowly down the
spine, until at last my whole body felt as if it had been pounded with
giant hammers.

I had an idea at one time that I had fallen into the power of the
Inquisition, and been tortured by the head screw and the rack, because
often a man in a black _capucha_ flitted about me; but later I realized
that my suffering was caused by becoming conscious of the world's motion--a
terrible, ceaseless whirling, which, being onc