A deep silence hung over the whole atmosphere. The wind was voiceless
among the steady trees. The stir and action in the being of nature and
the life of man seemed enthralled, suspended, stifled. The air was
laden with a burdensome heat; and all things on earth, animate and
inanimate, felt the oppression that weighed on them from the higher
elements. The people who lay gasping for breath in the famine-stricken
city, and the blades of grass that drooped languidly on the dry sward
beyond the walls, owned the enfeebling influence alike.
As the hours wore on and night stealthily and gradually advanced, a
monotonous darkness overspread, one after another, the objects
discernible to Hermanric from the solitary ground he still occupied.
Soon the great city faded into one vast, impenetrable shadow, while the
suburbs and the low country around them vanished in the thick darkness
that gathered almost perceptibly over the earth. And now the sole
object distinctly visible was the figure of a weary sentinel, who stood
on the frowning rampart immediately above the rifted wall, and whose
drooping figure, propped upon his weapon, was indicated in hard relief
against the thin, solitary streak of light still shining in the cold and
cloudy wastes of the western sky.
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