I first saw you--good-bye--and good-bye!"

He was gone. It was as though their embrace had literally been wrenched
asunder. He was gone. And even as he passed from her vision, from the
light into the gloom, so it seemed as though he had borne the light of
her life with him, and, as Lilith stood there in the open doorway,
gazing forth into the night, the dull measured clank of the battery
stamps seemed to beat in cruel, pitiless refrain within her heart:

"At the twelfth hour! at the twelfth hour!"

CHAPTER XII.

"THE DARK PLACES OF THE EARTH."

The sun is setting above the tropical forest--hot and red and smoky--his
fiery ball imparting something of a coppery molten hue to the vast seas
of luxuriant verdure, rolling, with scarce a break, on all sides, far as
the eye can reach. But beneath, in the dim shade, where the air is
choked by rotting undergrowth and tangled vegetation, the now slanting
rays are powerless to penetrate, powerless to dispel the steamy miasmic
exhalations. Silence, too, is the rule in that semi-gloom, save for here
and there the half-frightened chirp of a bird far up among the
tree-tops, or the stealthy rustle beneath as some serpent, or huge
venomous insect, moves upon its way. For among the decayed wood of
fallen tree trunks, and dry lichens and hoary mosses growing therefrom,
do such delight to dwell.

Beautiful as this shaded solitude is with its vistas of massive
tree-trunk and sombre foliage, the latter here and there relieved by
clusters of scarlet-hued blossoms, there is withal an awesomeness about
its beauty. Even the surroundings will soon begin to take on shape, and
the boles and tossing boughs, and naked, dead, and broken fragments
starting from the dank soil, assume form, attitude, countenance, in a
hundred divers contortions--gnome-like, grotesque, diabolical. Strange,
too, if the wayfarer threading the steamy mazes of these unending glades
does not soon think to hear ghostly whisperings in the awed silence of
the air, does not conjure up unseen eyes marking his every step--for the
hot moist depression is such as to weigh alike upon nerve and brain.

And now, through the sombre vistas of this phantom-evoking solitude,
faint and far comes a strange sound--a low, vibrating, booming hum,
above which, now and again, arises a shrill, long-drawn wail. The effect
is indescribably gruesome and eerie--in fact, terror-striking--even if
human, for there is an indefinable something,