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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
The Complete Novels of Bram Stoker presents a comprehensive collection of Stoker's remarkable literary contributions, encapsulating his mastery of Gothic fiction and psychological horror. Most notably, this anthology includes his seminal work, "Dracula," alongside lesser-known yet equally captivating stories like "The Jewel of Seven Stars" and "The Lady of the Shroud." Stoker's inventive narrative techniques, including epistolary formats and atmospheric descriptions, reflect the Victorian zeitgeist and its preoccupations with sexuality, colonialism, and the supernatural. Together, these novels explore themes of immortality, the clash of cultures, and the complexities of human desire, showcasing Stoker's profound skill in weaving rich tapestries of suspense and intrigue. Bram Stoker, an Irish author born in 1847, was profoundly influenced by his studies in folklore and history, as well as his friendship with the actor Henry Irving, who inspired the theatricality evident in Stoker's work. His diverse experiences, from his travels across Europe to his fascination with the macabre, informed his exploration of darker themes. Stoker's writing not only solidified his place in literary history but also paved the way for modern horror fiction, influencing an entire genre. This collection is not just a must-read for aficionados of Gothic literature but also an essential exploration of the human psyche and societal fears at the turn of the 20th century. Readers will find Stoker's novels resonate with contemporary issues, making them as relevant today as when they were first penned. Delve into the complete works of a master storyteller and experience the haunting narratives that have captivated audiences for generations. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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The Complete Novels of Bram Stoker
Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection gathers the complete novels of Bram Stoker, bringing into one place the full range of his long-form fiction, published between 1875 and 1911. While Dracula often defines his reputation, the assembled works reveal a writer of striking variety: regional tales rooted in folklore, romances and adventures shaped by contemporary life, and late forays into occult and scientific speculation. Presenting all twelve novels together allows readers to trace experiments in narrative form and evolving preoccupations across decades, and to appreciate how Stoker’s imagination moved from local landscapes and social dilemmas to broader anxieties about modernity, empire, and the persistence of the uncanny.
The contents here are novels only. Stoker’s shorter fiction, journalism, and other writings are beyond the scope of this volume. Within these novels, however, he frequently incorporates multiple text types as narrative devices: diaries, letters, memoranda, official reports, newspaper clippings, and other documentary artifacts. This technique, most famously deployed in Dracula, also informs several later works, lending a distinctive air of immediacy and verisimilitude. The result is long-form storytelling that feels compiled as much as composed, where competing voices and records create a sense of lived reality. Readers thus encounter not only plots and characters, but layered archives of testimony, rumor, and observation.
Across these books, certain themes recur with notable force. Stoker is consistently fascinated by thresholds: between past and present, superstition and science, center and periphery, land and sea. He sets moral resolve against seductive danger, testing social codes through ordeals of courage, loyalty, and belief. Stylistically, he favors brisk scene construction, alternating intimacy and spectacle, and a documentary texture that anchors the marvelous in familiar detail. He is attentive to new technologies and institutions—telegraphy, typewriting, law, medicine, military organization—while remaining alert to folklore and ritual. As a whole, the novels endure for their synthesis of cultural topicality with atmosphere, suspense, and an abiding sense of mystery.
Dracula stands at the heart of Stoker’s achievement, a late-Victorian Gothic narrative assembled from journals, letters, and reports. Its opening movements juxtapose unfamiliar Eastern European settings with everyday professional routines, before shifting to British shores where the story’s anxieties intensify. The novel’s power lies not only in its famous antagonist, but in the interplay of faith and empiricism, coordinated action and creeping dread, modern tools and ancient forces. It crystallizes concerns that echo throughout Stoker’s fiction: the vulnerability of borders, the volatility of desire, and the need for solidarity in the face of the inexplicable, all conveyed through an arresting chorus of voices.
Several early novels draw richly on Atlantic and Irish settings. The Primrose Path offers a sober study of temptation and consequence. The Snake’s Pass moves through an Irish landscape shaped by weather, geology, and legend, where questions of land, identity, and fortune converge. The Watter’s Mou’ turns to a North Sea fishing community, exploring how duty, secrecy, and survival strain personal bonds. In each, Stoker grounds narrative momentum in the textures of place: coastlines and boglands, storms and harbors, customs and local speech. Folklore and rumor entwine with practical labor, and moral choices are tested under social pressure and elemental conditions.
Stoker also wrote contemporary romances that probe courtship, reputation, and the ethics of power. The Shoulder of Shasta plays with transatlantic perspectives and the allure of open frontiers. Miss Betty and Lady Athlyne consider the demands of honor and the choreography of social scrutiny, while The Man (The Gates of Life) charts the shaping of character through adversity and steadfast regard. In these works, he treats affection as both personal and communal—a matter of private feeling conducted under public eyes. The novels balance sentiment with action, attentive to decorum yet alive to daring, and often test conventional roles without abandoning moral seriousness.
The Mystery of the Sea blends coastal realism with visionary disturbance, setting second sight and coded messages against maritime peril. Scotland’s shores provide both scenery and structure, their caves, tides, and headlands shaping the novel’s puzzles. Stoker uses cryptography, prophecy, and shifting alliances to interrogate trust and foresight, while keeping events tethered to concrete detail—charts, tides, and navigational judgment. The result is an adventure that dramatizes his recurring interest in how knowledge is won: through patient analysis, disciplined collaboration, and the willingness to heed warnings that do not fit familiar categories. Sea and shore alike become laboratories of fate and resolve.
The Jewel of Seven Stars engages the era’s Egyptological fascinations, bringing antiquity into intimate contact with a modern household. Archaeological ambition, museum culture, and domestic vulnerability intersect as characters confront a presence felt across time. The novel examines how curiosity, reverence, and possession can blur, and how the past may seem to insist upon terms of its own. Notably, it exists in distinct versions from the early twentieth century, reflecting different resolutions to its tensions. Without venturing into outcomes, readers will find a carefully staged inquiry into responsibility and risk when science, ritual, and desire meet at the threshold of the unknown.
The Lady of the Shroud shifts to a Balkan setting at a moment of political uncertainty, weaving rumors of the uncanny into strategic calculation and civic aspiration. Here, telegrams, letters, and official memoranda intersect with local legend as communities negotiate trust and leadership. Stoker uses the language of governance—titles, councils, orderly procedure—alongside nocturnal whispers and watchful eyes to explore how authority is established and defended. The novel’s fascination with borders—geographical, cultural, and perceptual—returns with added urgency, as communication itself becomes a battleground. The interplay between public duty and private feeling drives a narrative that is both romantic and tactical.
The Lair of the White Worm (The Garden of Evil) stands among Stoker’s most audacious works, folding prehistoric suggestion, rural superstition, and speculative science into a stark English setting. The countryside’s pits, mounds, and strata act as imaginative triggers, while eccentric theories and ominous sightings test the limits of rational explanation. The novel’s intensity comes from its collision of plausibility and extravagance: measured discussion gives way to imagery that feels vast and unsettling. Even when its ideas press against the probable, the book exemplifies Stoker’s willingness to pursue wonder and terror to their edges, asking what old narratives still stir beneath modern ground.
Threaded through these novels is a distinctive sense of method. Stoker builds suspense by circulating partial information—letters delayed, diaries withheld, testimonies that must be collated. He favors clear stakes, often articulated through law, medicine, or codes of conduct, and he choreographs group action with particular care. Regional speech and professional jargon lend texture, even when they challenge contemporary readers. He is drawn to coastlines and weather, to plans and maps, to institutional frameworks and the improvisations they require. This documentary habit does not eliminate wonder; it contains it, allowing marvels to flicker within the margins of ledgers, reports, and sober agreements.
Taken together, these novels invite a broader understanding of Bram Stoker’s achievement. They show a writer alert to the pressures of his time—technological change, shifting empires, the spectacle of the stage and the page—yet committed to stories in which moral choice and communal effort matter. From the eerie assemblage of Dracula to the regional dramas and worldly romances, the collection demonstrates both variety and coherence. It restores context to the famous and visibility to the neglected, encouraging fresh comparisons among works that share concerns with fear, hope, and responsibility. Read as a whole, they offer a sustained exploration of courage at the threshold.
Author Biography
Bram Stoker (1847–1912) was an Irish novelist, critic, and long-serving theatrical manager whose name is inseparable from Dracula, a cornerstone of Gothic fiction. Writing in the late Victorian and early Edwardian periods, he combined administrative rigor with imaginative storytelling shaped by journalism, travel, and the stage. While Dracula later defined the modern vampire in popular culture, Stoker produced a broader body of fiction and nonfiction that explored superstition, modernity, and performance. His career unfolded between Dublin and London, within a cosmopolitan theatrical milieu that brought him into contact with prominent artists and audiences. Today he is read for narrative innovation, cultural resonance, and lasting mythmaking.
Raised in Dublin, Stoker studied at Trinity College, where he read mathematics and immersed himself in oratory, athletics, and student societies. His training emphasized disciplined research and public argument, skills that later informed both his criticism and the documentary textures of his fiction. After university he entered the Irish civil service, beginning a career that combined government work with extensive writing. Although he did not initially pursue literature full‑time, he published reviews and occasional pieces, building a reputation for careful observation and industriousness. This foundation—analytical, pragmatic, and public-facing—proved decisive when he moved from administrative posts into the press, the theatre, and eventually long-form narrative fiction.
In Dublin, Stoker served as a clerk at Dublin Castle and, in parallel, became theatre critic for the Dublin Evening Mail. His thoughtful reviews brought him into contact with leading performers and introduced him to London stages. He formed a professional connection with the actor Henry Irving after admiring performances that emphasized psychological nuance and spectacle. Literary influences included the Irish Gothic tradition associated with Sheridan Le Fanu and contemporary poetry, notably Walt Whitman, whom Stoker admired and later met. This mixture—administrative discipline, journalistic habits, Irish Gothic antecedents, and exposure to star-driven theatre—shaped the sensibility that would give his fiction both procedural detail and eerie atmosphere.
Stoker relocated to London to become business manager for Irving at the Lyceum Theatre, a position he held for decades. The role demanded rigorous organization, international touring, and constant negotiation with actors, designers, and financiers. He traveled widely with the company and observed backstage practices that later surfaced in his fiction’s interest in documents, timetables, and professional expertise. Alongside these duties, he published books across genres: the legal handbook The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland; the children’s collection Under the Sunset; and early novels such as The Snake’s Pass, The Watter’s Mou’, and The Shoulder of Shasta. Theatre remained his livelihood; writing, his parallel vocation.
Dracula, published in the late 1890s, distilled years of note‑taking, travel, and reading into a meticulously constructed Gothic narrative. Stoker drew on settings he had visited, including the Yorkshire port of Whitby, and consulted works on superstition and folklore, such as Emily Gerard’s writings on Transylvania. Structured as journals, letters, and clippings, the novel juxtaposes modern technologies and professional expertise with archaic menace. Contemporary reviewers recognized its ingenuity and atmosphere, though few foresaw its cultural afterlife. Over the twentieth century its reputation grew steadily, as readers and adapters found in it a flexible framework for exploring fear, desire, borders, and the pressures of modern urban life.
Stoker continued to write prolifically after Dracula. The Jewel of Seven Stars explored archaeology and occult revivalism; The Mystery of the Sea blended espionage and the supernatural; The Lady of the Shroud and The Lair of the White Worm pursued late experiments in romance and horror. He also issued nonfiction, notably Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving, a major theatrical memoir, and Famous Impostors, a compendium of confidence artists and pretenders. Posthumously, Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories gathered shorter fiction. Reception varied, but reviewers often noted his energetic plotting, documentary method, and interest in contemporary anxieties—empire, science, crime—filtered through Gothic conventions and melodramatic theatricality.
In his later years Stoker focused on writing and on memorializing the theatrical world he had helped manage, particularly after Irving’s death in the early 1900s. His health declined, and he died in London in the early 1910s. Although not all of his books remained in print, Dracula fueled an expanding constellation of stage and screen adaptations that fixed the vampire as a global archetype. Scholars now read his work within Irish studies, Gothic and horror criticism, and histories of gender, technology, and empire. Stoker’s legacy endures as a fusion of managerial precision and imaginative breadth that continues to animate popular and academic culture.
Historical Context
Bram Stoker’s novels were produced across the late Victorian and early Edwardian decades, from The Primrose Path in 1875 to The Lair of the White Worm in 1911, a span that framed seismic changes in Britain and Ireland. Born in 1847 in Clontarf, Dublin, and dying in London in 1912, Stoker wrote within an empire at its zenith yet haunted by anxieties of decline. His fiction traverses Ireland, Scotland, England, the Balkans, and the United States, reflecting new mobilities of steamship and railway. The collection moves among Gothic, regional, imperial, and romantic modes, shaped by the era’s technological, political, and cultural ferment.
Irish contexts decisively shaped Stoker’s imagination. Educated at Trinity College Dublin and employed at Dublin Castle from 1867 to 1878, he absorbed bureaucratic method and documentary habits that later surface as diaries, reports, and letters across the novels. As theatre critic for the Dublin Evening Mail, connected to Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, he absorbed Irish Gothic’s emphasis on spectral legacies and contested land. The Irish Land War (1879–1882), Home Rule debates (1886 and 1893), and the Parnell scandal of 1890 formed a backdrop of social struggle and national identity. Folklore, Catholic-Protestant tensions, and west-of-Ireland landscapes recur as deep cultural reservoirs.
From 1878 to 1902, Stoker managed Henry Irving’s Lyceum Theatre in London, a position that embedded him in metropolitan networks of actors, critics, financiers, and international audiences. The Lyceum’s tours to the United States, beginning in 1883, made Stoker a seasoned transatlantic traveler. He met Walt Whitman in 1884 and navigated American cities and railways, experiences that inform confident, mobile protagonists and cross-border plots. The managerial rigor of theatre, with its timetables, lighting innovations, and publicity practices, resonates in the novels’ attention to logistics, modern devices, and public opinion. The theatrical milieu also sharpened his sense of staging, secrecy, and spectacle.
Coastal Britain profoundly influenced the work. Stoker’s 1890 holiday in Whitby and his repeated summers at Cruden Bay in Aberdeenshire from the early 1890s supplied harbors, cliffs, lighthouses, and fishing communities. North Sea storms, salvage lore, and the rhythms of the herring fishery animate maritime scenes. Smuggling histories and the enforcement of customs law provided charged narratives of concealment and pursuit relevant to several sea-facing novels. Scottish and English coasts become zones where imperial sea power meets local subsistence, and where wreck, contraband, and superstition intersect. These littoral spaces frame questions of fate, law, and moral economy typical of the era.
Technological modernity was central to fin de siecle storytelling. Telegraphy, the telephone (patented 1876), rail networks, the typewriter, the Kodak camera, and Edison’s phonograph (1877) transformed communication and record-keeping. Stoker’s protagonists rely on dictation cylinders, stenography, logbooks, and clipped news items, reflecting New Journalism’s collage of testimony and fact. Cryptography, ciphers, and code-breaking—popularized since Poe—gain fresh relevance amid imperial intelligence work and naval communications. Wireless telegraphy advanced rapidly after Guglielmo Marconi’s demonstrations of the late 1890s and the 1901 transatlantic signal, making invisible information a plausible narrative force. The friction between mechanical certainty and uncanny residue energizes the fiction’s investigative temper.
Medical science furnished both authority and anxiety. Joseph Lister’s antiseptic surgery became orthodox by the 1880s, while Karl Landsteiner’s 1901 discovery of blood groups clarified why transfusions had often been perilous. Stoker’s scenes of transfusion, fever management, and clinical observation register a world of experimental therapeutics still shadowed by risk. Hypnotism, associated with Jean-Martin Charcot in Paris and the rival Nancy school, moved from stage novelty to respectable inquiry, shaping literary explorations of trance, suggestion, and divided consciousness. Sleepwalking, somnambulism, and nervous exhaustion mirror modern stresses. The medicalized gaze coexists uneasily with folk cures and sacramental protections across disparate settings.
The late nineteenth century saw a surge in occult and psychical inquiry. The Theosophical Society (founded 1875), the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (1888), and the Society for Psychical Research (1882) fostered debates about mediumship, apparitions, and survival. Figures such as Frederic Myers, Edmund Gurney, and William Crookes lent scientific prestige to contested phenomena. In parallel, Egyptomania intensified after Britain’s occupation of Egypt in 1882, with Flinders Petrie’s field methods and Amelia Edwards’s campaigning creating the Egypt Exploration Fund. Mummies, funerary magic, and ancient curses entered popular literature as vehicles for anxieties about empire, gender, and scientific trespass, themes Stoker repeatedly mines.
Geopolitics gave Stoker ready-made theatres of crisis. The Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878) and the Treaty of Berlin reorganized southeastern Europe, while the 1908 annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina by Austria-Hungary and earlier Balkan uprisings kept the region in the British press. The Spanish-American War of 1898 and the South African War (1899–1902) challenged assumptions about British supremacy and inaugurated a new American ascendancy. Such contexts inform plots involving secret committees, border raids, and contested sovereignties. The specter of invasion, migration, and reverse colonization—foreign threats entering the domestic sphere—became staple anxieties. Stoker’s frontier zones dramatize the fragility of order when empires abut local nationalisms.
Urban modernity exerted a darker pressure. London’s East End, mapped by Charles Booth’s poverty surveys (1889–1903), epitomized overcrowding, sweatshops, and immigrant arrival. The 1888 Whitechapel murders amplified fears of nocturnal anonymity and failed policing, while William Stead’s New Journalism and sensational periodicals accelerated rumor and moral panic. The Aliens Act of 1905 codified suspicion toward Eastern European arrivals. Stoker’s nocturnal streets, dockyards, and boarding houses inhabit this milieu of transience and surveillance. Ships’ manifests, newspaper classifieds, and police gazettes become narrative instruments. The metropolis functions as both crucible of cosmopolitan exchange and stage for xenophobic fantasies and social reformist rhetoric.
Debates about women’s roles formed an essential backdrop. The Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882 expanded financial agency, while higher education for women and office work created new public presences. Sarah Grand’s 1894 coinage of the New Woman, Mona Caird’s marriage critiques in 1888, and cycling, typing, and chaperonage disputes reconfigured courtship and authority. Stoker’s heroines often combine domestic virtue with professional competence, reflecting this transitional moment. Transatlantic marriages—the so-called dollar princess phenomenon—fed narratives of heiresses, titles, and cultural negotiation. Questions of guardianship, consent, and reputation thread through romances and adventures alike, set against shifting laws and social codes.
The fin de siecle obsession with degeneration supplied a vocabulary of fear. Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1892) and Cesare Lombroso’s criminal anthropology posited inherited taint, atavism, and physiognomy as signs of moral decline. Francis Galton’s eugenic speculations blurred science and social prejudice. Such theories percolated into fiction as anxieties about mixed blood, racial vigor, and bodily metamorphosis. The rural aristocrat in decay, the urban predator, and the seductive foreigner became archetypes. Stoker’s work probes whether modernity purifies or corrodes character. Biological metaphors of infection, parasitism, and monstrous rebirth shadow love plots and adventure structures, linking private bodies to national strength or weakness.
Folklore and the authority of place hold unusual sway in Stoker’s world. The Gaelic Revival—Galway and Mayo story-collecting, the Gaelic League founded in 1893, and the Celtic Twilight of W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory—elevated oral tradition to national patrimony. Andrew Lang and Joseph Jacobs popularized fairy and wonder tales across Britain. Local legends of dragons or worms, bog roads, selkies, and second sight coexisted with parish registers and Ordnance Survey maps. Stoker draws upon the lore of fishermen, shepherds, and peasants as living epistemologies, setting them against scientific skepticism. Landscape thus becomes archive: moor, cliff, and bog are mnemonic and prophetic.
Conspiracy and governance, familiar to a Dublin Castle civil servant, infuse narrative method. The Fenian rising of 1867 and the Phoenix Park assassinations of 1882 framed Irish debates about violence and legitimacy. British coastguard services, customs men, and naval patrols created a maritime bureaucracy confronting smuggling and wrecking traditions. Home Rule bills in 1886 and 1893 staged constitutional contest as theatre. In Stoker’s novels, official seals, dispatches, and legal affidavits compete with clandestine oaths and passwords. Intelligence work, decoys, and deciphers speak to an empire anxious about porous borders and internal subversion, while policing remains uneven between metropolis and periphery.
Publishing economics shaped form and reach. The three-decker novel, dominant through Mudie’s lending library, declined after the early 1890s, encouraging single-volume issues and brisker pacing. Stoker had early experience with serialization, as with The Primrose Path in The Shamrock in 1875, before moving to established London houses. The 1891 Chace Act improved U.S.-U.K. copyright relations, expanding transatlantic markets. Periodicals like The Strand, Cornhill, and Pearson’s conditioned readers to hybrid genres—mystery, romance, occult—within tight word economies. Advertising, railway bookstalls, and circulating libraries broadened audiences beyond elite salons. Stoker’s shifting mix of romance, regionalism, and Gothic aligns with these commercial currents.
Modern travel reframed narrative possibility. Steamship lines such as Cunard and White Star enabled swift Atlantic crossings; express trains stitched together highland, moor, and metropolis; the Orient Express (from 1883) made the Balkans newly accessible to British tourists and spies alike. Guidebooks by Murray and Baedeker disciplined sightseeing, while passports were informal and borders porous. In the American West, the 1890 census proclaimed the frontier closed even as Mount Shasta and Yosemite drew travelers. Early motoring and yachting added new freedoms and hazards after 1900. Stoker’s plots exploit these mobilities, juxtaposing speed with wilderness, discretion with the traceability of timetables.
Religious climates add moral texture. Victorian disputes over ritualism within the Church of England, Nonconformist activism, and Anglo-Irish Protestant identities meet the sacramentalism of Roman Catholicism and the alterity of Eastern Orthodoxy. Missionary zeal and Orientalist curiosity shaped British encounters with the Balkans and the Near East. Sacred objects—relics, crucifixes, amulets—operate as cultural technologies of protection in a world otherwise ruled by clinical procedure and bureaucratic reason. The tension between providence and empiricism underwrites conversions, vows, and moral reckonings. Stoker’s characters navigate confession, duty, and temptation against a wide canvas of churches, chapels, and heterodox societies.
Stoker’s intellectual sources and friendships thread across the oeuvre. He admired Le Fanu’s Carmilla as a model of Irish Gothic atmosphere; he read William Wilkinson’s 1820 history of Wallachia and Moldavia in Whitby; he knew Henry Irving intimately and published Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving in 1906; he corresponded with Walt Whitman; he dedicated a major work to Hall Caine; and he cited the Hungarian orientalist Arminius Vambery among his informants. By 1912, amid Edwardian shifts in taste and politics, his novels had mapped a world where folklore meets cryptography, empire meets insurgency, and courtship meets biology—an enduring synthesis of his age.
Synopsis (Selection)
Dracula
Told through diaries, letters, and news clippings, the novel follows Count Dracula’s move from Transylvania to England and the coordinated effort to stop his predation. It blends modern technology with folklore in a race against a mounting supernatural threat.
The Snake's Pass
Set in rural Ireland, a young Englishman is drawn into local legends, land disputes, and a romance as a shifting bog conceals an old treasure. Storms, superstition, and greed converge around the perilous landscape.
The Watter's Mou'
In a North Sea fishing village, lovers find themselves on opposite sides of the law when smuggling and coastguard duty collide. Duty, secrecy, and the sea’s dangers drive the brief, tense drama.
The Mystery of the Sea
On the Scottish coast, an American heiress and a man gifted with second sight become entangled in cryptograms, prophecies, and a hidden treasure tied to international intrigue. The story fuses romance, espionage, and the uncanny.
The Jewel of Seven Stars
An Egyptologist’s obsession with reviving an ancient queen unleashes strange phenomena that threaten his household. Ritual, archaeology, and occult science converge in a tale of mounting dread.
The Man (The Gates of Life)
A coming-of-age romance that follows intertwined lives tested by loss, inheritance, and the expectations placed on men and women. It explores steadfast love, resilience, and Victorian ideals of duty.
The Lady of the Shroud
A reclusive heir in the Balkans encounters a mysterious lady who appears by night, blurring the line between superstition and reality. Political upheaval, modern armaments, and chivalric romance reshape a troubled frontier.
The Lair of the White Worm (The Garden of Evil)
Gothic horror centered on an ancient, serpentine evil haunting the English countryside and those who seek to master or destroy it. Mesmerism, psychic warfare, and subterranean peril drive the confrontation.
The Primrose Path
A cautionary tale of a craftsman lured from home to the city, whose descent into drink and vice imperils his family. The novel presents a stark temperance-era portrait of urban temptation.
The Shoulder of Shasta
A transatlantic romance set amid the Californian wilderness and European society, contrasting frontier independence with Old World convention. An adventurous heroine weighs freedom, status, and the risks of love.
Lady Athlyne
An American young woman’s courtship with an Irish nobleman becomes tangled in questions of reputation, parental consent, and social rank. Misunderstandings and near-scandal propel a genteel, international romance.
Miss Betty
A late-Victorian romance of courtship and miscommunication in an English town, where pride, rumor, and carefully guarded secrets complicate the path to marriage. Light intrigue underscores manners and morality.
The Complete Novels of Bram Stoker
Dracula
CHAPTER I.
JONATHAN HARKER’S JOURNAL.
(Kept in shorthand.)
3 May. Bistritz.—Left Munich at 8.35 p.m. on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6.46, but train was an hour late. Buda-Pesth seems a wonderful place, from the glimpse which I got of it from the train and the little I could walk through the streets. I feared to go very far from the station, as we had arrived late and would start as near the correct time as possible. The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East; the most Western of splendid bridges over the Danube, which is here of noble width and depth, took us among the traditions of Turkish rule.
We left in pretty good time, and came after nightfall to Klausenburgh. Here I stopped for the night at the Hotel Royale. I had for dinner, or rather supper, a chicken done up some way with red pepper, which was very good but thirsty. (Mem., get recipe for Mina.) I asked the waiter, and he said it was called “paprika hendl,” and that, as it was a national dish, I should be able to get it anywhere along the Carpathians. I found my smattering of German very useful here; indeed, I don’t know how I should be able to get on without it.
Having some time at my disposal when in London, I had visited the British Museum, and made search among the books and maps of the library regarding Transylvania; it had struck me that some foreknowledge of the country could hardly fail to have some importance in dealing with a noble of that country. I find that the district he named is in the extreme east of the country, just on the borders of three states, Transylvania, Moldavia, and Bukovina, in the midst of the Carpathian mountains; one of the wildest and least known portions of Europe. I was not able to light on any map or work giving the exact locality of the Castle Dracula, as there are no maps of this country as yet to compare with our own Ordnance Survey maps; but I found that Bistritz, the post town named by Count Dracula, is a fairly well-known place. I shall enter here some of my notes, as they may refresh my memory when I talk over my travels with Mina.
In the population of Transylvania there are four distinct nationalities: Saxons in the south, and mixed with them the Wallachs, who are the descendants of the Dacians; Magyars in the west; and Szekelys in the east and north. I am going among the latter, who claim to be descended from Attila and the Huns. This may be so, for when the Magyars conquered the country in the eleventh century they found the Huns settled in it. I read that every known superstition in the world is gathered into the horseshoe of the Carpathians, as if it were the centre of some sort of imaginative whirlpool; if so my stay may be very interesting. (Mem., I must ask the Count all about them.)
I did not sleep well, though my bed was comfortable enough, for I had all sorts of queer dreams. There was a dog howling all night under my window, which may have had something to do with it; or it may have been the paprika, for I had to drink up all the water in my carafe, and was still thirsty. Towards morning I slept and was wakened by the continuous knocking at my door, so I guess I must have been sleeping soundly then. I had for breakfast more paprika, and a sort of porridge of maize flour which they said was “mamaliga,” and egg-plant stuffed with forcemeat, a very excellent dish, which they call “impletata.” (Mem., get recipe for this also.) I had to hurry breakfast, for the train started a little before eight, or rather it ought to have done so, for after rushing to the station at 7.30 I had to sit in the carriage for more than an hour before we began to move. It seems to me that the further East you go the more unpunctual are the trains. What ought they to be in China?
All day long we seemed to dawdle through a country which was full of beauty of every kind. Sometimes we saw little towns or castles on the top of steep hills such as we see in old missals; sometimes we ran by rivers and streams which seemed from the wide stony margin on each side of them to be subject to great floods. It takes a lot of water, and running strong, to sweep the outside edge of a river clear. At every station there were groups of people, sometimes crowds, and in all sorts of attire. Some of them were just like the peasants at home or those I saw coming through France and Germany, with short jackets and round hats and home-made trousers; but others were very picturesque. The women looked pretty, except when you got near them, but they were very clumsy about the waist. They had all full white sleeves of some kind or other, and most of them had big belts with a lot of strips of something fluttering from them like the dresses in a ballet, but of course petticoats under them. The strangest figures we saw were the Slovaks, who are more barbarian than the rest, with their big cowboy hats, great baggy dirty-white trousers, white linen shirts, and enormous heavy leather belts, nearly a foot wide, all studded over with brass nails. They wore high boots, with their trousers tucked into them, and had long black hair and heavy black moustaches. They are very picturesque, but do not look prepossessing. On the stage they would be set down at once as some old Oriental band of brigands. They are, however, I am told, very harmless and rather wanting in natural self-assertion.
It was on the dark side of twilight when we got to Bistritz, which is a very interesting old place. Being practically on the frontier—for the Borgo Pass leads from it into Bukovina—it has had a very stormy existence, and it certainly shows marks of it. Fifty years ago a series of great fires took place, which made terrible havoc on five separate occasions. At the very beginning of the seventeenth century it underwent a siege of three weeks and lost 13,000 people, the casualties of war proper being assisted by famine and disease.
Count Dracula had directed me to go to the Golden Krone Hotel, which I found, to my delight, to be thoroughly old-fashioned, for of course I wanted to see all I could of the ways of the country. I was evidently expected, for when I got near the door I faced a cheery-looking elderly woman in the usual peasant dress—white undergarment with long double apron, front and back, of coloured stuff fitting almost too tight for modesty. When I came close she bowed, and said: “The Herr Englishman?” “Yes,” I said, “Jonathan Harker.” She smiled, and gave some message to an elderly man in white shirt-sleeves, who had followed her to the door. He went, but immediately returned with a letter:—
“MY FRIEND,—Welcome to the Carpathians. I am anxiously expecting you. Sleep well to-night. At three to-morrow the diligence will start for Bukovina; a place on it is kept for you. At the Borgo Pass my carriage will await you and will bring you to me. I trust that your journey from London has been a happy one, and that you will enjoy your stay in my beautiful land.
“Your friend,
“DRACULA.”
4 May.—I found that my landlord had got a letter from the Count, directing him to secure the best place on the coach for me; but on making inquiries as to details he seemed somewhat reticent, and pretended that he could not understand my German. This could not be true, because up to then he had understood it perfectly; at least, he answered my questions exactly as if he did. He and his wife, the old lady who had received me, looked at each other in a frightened sort of way. He mumbled out that the money had been sent in a letter, and that was all he knew. When I asked him if he knew Count Dracula, and could tell me anything of his castle, both he and his wife crossed themselves, and, saying that they knew nothing at all, simply refused to speak further. It was so near the time of starting that I had no time to ask any one else, for it was all very mysterious and not by any means comforting.
Just before I was leaving, the old lady came up to my room and said in a very hysterical way:
“Must you go? Oh! young Herr, must you go?” She was in such an excited state that she seemed to have lost her grip of what German she knew, and mixed it all up with some other language which I did not know at all. I was just able to follow her by asking many questions. When I told her that I must go at once, and that I was engaged on important business, she asked again:
“Do you know what day it is?” I answered that it was the fourth of May. She shook her head as she said again:
“Oh, yes! I know that, I know that! but do you know what day it is?” On my saying that I did not understand, she went on:
“It is the eve of St. George’s Day. Do you not know that to-night, when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will have full sway? Do you know where you are going, and what you are going to?” She was in such evident distress that I tried to comfort her, but without effect. Finally she went down on her knees and implored me not to go; at least to wait a day or two before starting. It was all very ridiculous, but I did not feel comfortable. However, there was business to be done, and I could allow nothing to interfere with it. I therefore tried to raise her up, and said, as gravely as I could, that I thanked her, but my duty was imperative, and that I must go. She then rose and dried her eyes, and taking a crucifix from her neck offered it to me. I did not know what to do, for, as an English Churchman, I have been taught to regard such things as in some measure idolatrous, and yet it seemed so ungracious to refuse an old lady meaning so well and in such a state of mind. She saw, I suppose, the doubt in my face, for she put the rosary round my neck, and said, “For your mother’s sake,” and went out of the room. I am writing up this part of the diary whilst I am waiting for the coach, which is, of course, late; and the crucifix is still round my neck. Whether it is the old lady’s fear, or the many ghostly traditions of this place, or the crucifix itself, I do not know, but I am not feeling nearly as easy in my mind as usual. If this book should ever reach Mina before I do, let it bring my good-bye. Here comes the coach!
5 May. The Castle.—The grey of the morning has passed, and the sun is high over the distant horizon, which seems jagged, whether with trees or hills I know not, for it is so far off that big things and little are mixed. I am not sleepy, and, as I am not to be called till I awake, naturally I write till sleep comes. There are many odd things to put down, and, lest who reads them may fancy that I dined too well before I left Bistritz, let me put down my dinner exactly. I dined on what they call “robber steak”—bits of bacon, onion, and beef, seasoned with red pepper, and strung on sticks and roasted over the fire, in the simple style of the London cat’s-meat! The wine was Golden Mediasch, which produces a queer sting on the tongue, which is, however, not disagreeable. I had only a couple of glasses of this, and nothing else.
When I got on the coach the driver had not taken his seat, and I saw him talking with the landlady. They were evidently talking of me, for every now and then they looked at me, and some of the people who were sitting on the bench outside the door—which they call by a name meaning “word-bearer”—came and listened, and then they looked at me, most of them pityingly. I could hear a lot of words often repeated, queer words, for there were many nationalities in the crowd; so I quietly got my polyglot dictionary from my bag and looked them out. I must say they were not cheering to me, for amongst them were “Ordog”—Satan, “pokol”—hell, “stregoica”—witch, “vrolok” and “vlkoslak”—both of which mean the same thing, one being Slovak and the other Servian for something that is either were-wolf or vampire. (Mem., I must ask the Count about these superstitions.)
When we started, the crowd round the inn door, which had by this time swelled to a considerable size, all made the sign of the cross and pointed two fingers towards me. With some difficulty I got a fellow-passenger to tell me what they meant; he would not answer at first, but on learning that I was English, he explained that it was a charm or guard against the evil eye. This was not very pleasant for me, just starting for an unknown place to meet an unknown man; but every one seemed so kind-hearted, and so sorrowful, and so sympathetic that I could not but be touched. I shall never forget the last glimpse which I had of the inn-yard and its crowd of picturesque figures, all crossing themselves, as they stood round the wide archway, with its background of rich foliage of oleander and orange trees in green tubs clustered in the centre of the yard. Then our driver, whose wide linen drawers covered the whole front of the box-seat—“gotza” they call them—cracked his big whip over his four small horses, which ran abreast, and we set off on our journey.
I soon lost sight and recollection of ghostly fears in the beauty of the scene as we drove along, although had I known the language, or rather languages, which my fellow-passengers were speaking, I might not have been able to throw them off so easily. Before us lay a green sloping land full of forests and woods, with here and there steep hills, crowned with clumps of trees or with farmhouses, the blank gable end to the road. There was everywhere a bewildering mass of fruit blossom—apple, plum, pear, cherry; and as we drove by I could see the green grass under the trees spangled with the fallen petals. In and out amongst these green hills of what they call here the “Mittel Land” ran the road, losing itself as it swept round the grassy curve, or was shut out by the straggling ends of pine woods, which here and there ran down the hillsides like tongues of flame. The road was rugged, but still we seemed to fly over it with a feverish haste. I could not understand then what the haste meant, but the driver was evidently bent on losing no time in reaching Borgo Prund. I was told that this road is in summer-time excellent, but that it had not yet been put in order after the winter snows. In this respect it is different from the general run of roads in the Carpathians, for it is an old tradition that they are not to be kept in too good order. Of old the Hospadars would not repair them, lest the Turk should think that they were preparing to bring in foreign troops, and so hasten the war which was always really at loading point.
Beyond the green swelling hills of the Mittel Land rose mighty slopes of forest up to the lofty steeps of the Carpathians themselves. Right and left of us they towered, with the afternoon sun falling upon them and bringing out all the glorious colours of this beautiful range, deep blue and purple in the shadows of the peaks, green and brown where grass and rock mingled, and an endless perspective of jagged rock and pointed crags, till these were themselves lost in the distance, where the snowy peaks rose grandly. Here and there seemed mighty rifts in the mountains, through which, as the sun began to sink, we saw now and again the white gleam of falling water. One of my companions touched my arm as we swept round the base of a hill and opened up the lofty, snow-covered peak of a mountain, which seemed, as we wound on our serpentine way, to be right before us:—
“Look! Isten szek!”—“God’s seat!”—and he crossed himself reverently. As we wound on our endless way, and the sun sank lower and lower behind us, the shadows of the evening began to creep round us. This was emphasised by the fact that the snowy mountain-top still held the sunset, and seemed to glow out with a delicate cool pink. Here and there we passed Cszeks and Slovaks, all in picturesque attire, but I noticed that goitre was painfully prevalent. By the roadside were many crosses, and as we swept by, my companions all crossed themselves. Here and there was a peasant man or woman kneeling before a shrine, who did not even turn round as we approached, but seemed in the self-surrender of devotion to have neither eyes nor ears for the outer world. There were many things new to me: for instance, hay-ricks in the trees and here and there very beautiful masses of weeping birch, their white stems shining like silver through the delicate green of the leaves. Now and again we passed a leiterwagon—the ordinary peasant’s cart, with its long, snake-like vertebra, calculated to suit the inequalities of the road. On this were sure to be seated quite a group of home-coming peasants, the Cszeks with their white, and the Slovaks with their coloured, sheepskins, the latter carrying lance-fashion their long staves, with axe at end. As the evening fell it began to get very cold, and the growing twilight seemed to merge into one dark mistiness the gloom of the trees, oak, beech, and pine, though in the valleys which ran deep between the spurs of the hills, as we ascended through the Pass, the dark firs stood out here and there against the background of late-lying snow. Sometimes, as the road was cut through the pine woods that seemed in the darkness to be closing down upon us, great masses of greyness, which here and there bestrewed the trees, produced a peculiarly weird and solemn effect, which carried on the thoughts and grim fancies engendered earlier in the evening, when the falling sunset threw into strange relief the ghost-like clouds which amongst the Carpathians seem to wind ceaselessly through the valleys. Sometimes the hills were so steep that, despite our driver’s haste, the horses could only go slowly. I wished to get down and walk up them, as we do at home, but the driver would not hear of it. “No, no,” he said; “you must not walk here; the dogs are too fierce!” and then he added, with what he evidently meant for grim pleasantry—for he looked round to catch the approving smile of the rest—“and you may have enough of such matters before you go to sleep.” The only stop he would make was a moment’s pause to light his lamps.
When it grew dark there seemed to be some excitement amongst the passengers, and they kept speaking to him, one after the other, as though urging him to further speed. He lashed the horses unmercifully with his long whip, and with wild cries of encouragement urged them on to further exertions. Then through the darkness I could see a sort of patch of grey light ahead of us, as though there were a cleft in the hills. The excitement of the passengers grew greater; the crazy coach rocked on its great leather springs, and swayed like a boat tossed on a stormy sea. I had to hold on. The road grew more level, and we appeared to fly along. Then the mountains seemed to come nearer to us on each side and to frown down upon us; we were entering the Borgo Pass. One by one several of the passengers offered me gifts, which they pressed upon me with earnestness which would take no denial; these were certainly of an odd and varied kind, but each was given in simple good faith, with a kindly word, and a blessing, and that strange mixture of fear-meaning movements which I had seen outside the hotel at Bistritz—the sign of the cross and the guard against the evil eye. Then, as we flew along, the driver leaned forward, and on each side the passengers, craning over the edge of the coach, peered eagerly into the darkness. It was evident that something very exciting was either happening or expected, but though I asked each passenger, no one would give me the slightest explanation. This state of excitement kept on for some little time; and at last we saw before us the Pass opening out on the eastern side. There were dark, rolling clouds overhead, and in the air the heavy, oppressive sense of thunder. It seemed as though the mountain range had separated two atmospheres, and that now we had got into the thunderous one. I was now myself looking out for the conveyance which was to take me to the Count. Each moment I expected to see the glare of lamps through the blackness; but all was dark. The only light was the flickering rays of our own lamps, in which steam from our hard-driven horses rose in a white cloud. We could now see the sandy road lying white before us, but there was on it no sign of a vehicle. The passengers drew back with a sigh of gladness, which seemed to mock my own disappointment. I was already thinking what I had best do, when the driver, looking at his watch, said to the others something which I could hardly hear, it was spoken so quietly and in so low a tone; I thought it was, “An hour less than the time.” Then, turning to me, he said in German worse than my own:—
“There is no carriage here. The Herr is not expected, after all. He will now come on to Bukovina, and return to-morrow or the next day; better the next day.” Whilst he was speaking the horses began to neigh and snort and plunge wildly, so that the driver had to hold them up. Then, amongst a chorus of screams from the peasants and a universal crossing of themselves, a calèche, with four horses, drove up behind us, overtook us, and drew up beside the coach. I could see from the flash of our lamps, as the rays fell on them, that the horses were coal-black and splendid animals. They were driven by a tall man, with a long brown beard and a great black hat, which seemed to hide his face from us. I could only see the gleam of a pair of very bright eyes, which seemed red in the lamplight, as he turned to us. He said to the driver:—
“You are early to-night, my friend.” The man stammered in reply:—
“The English Herr was in a hurry,” to which the stranger replied:—
“That is why, I suppose, you wished him to go on to Bukovina. You cannot deceive me, my friend; I know too much, and my horses are swift.” As he spoke he smiled, and the lamplight fell on a hard-looking mouth, with very red lips and sharp-looking teeth, as white as ivory. One of my companions whispered to another the line from Burger’s “Lenore:”—
The strange driver evidently heard the words, for he looked up with a gleaming smile. The passenger turned his face away, at the same time putting out his two fingers and crossing himself. “Give me the Herr’s luggage,” said the driver; and with exceeding alacrity my bags were handed out and put in the calèche. Then I descended from the side of the coach, as the calèche was close alongside, the driver helping me with a hand which caught my arm in a grip of steel; his strength must have been prodigious. Without a word he shook his reins, the horses turned, and we swept into the darkness of the Pass. As I looked back I saw the steam from the horses of the coach by the light of the lamps, and projected against it the figures of my late companions crossing themselves. Then the driver cracked his whip and called to his horses, and off they swept on their way to Bukovina.
As they sank into the darkness I felt a strange chill, and a lonely feeling came over me; but a cloak was thrown over my shoulders, and a rug across my knees, and the driver said in excellent German:—
“The night is chill, mein Herr, and my master the Count bade me take all care of you. There is a flask of slivovitz [the plum brandy of the country] underneath the seat, if you should require it.” I did not take any, but it was a comfort to know it was there, all the same. I felt a little strange, and not a little frightened. I think had there been any alternative I should have taken it, instead of prosecuting that unknown night journey. The carriage went at a hard pace straight along, then we made a complete turn and went along another straight road. It seemed to me that we were simply going over and over the same ground again; and so I took note of some salient point, and found that this was so. I would have liked to have asked the driver what this all meant, but I really feared to do so, for I thought that, placed as I was, any protest would have had no effect in case there had been an intention to delay. By and by, however, as I was curious to know how time was passing, I struck a match, and by its flame looked at my watch; it was within a few minutes of midnight. This gave me a sort of shock, for I suppose the general superstition about midnight was increased by my recent experiences. I waited with a sick feeling of suspense.
Then a dog began to howl somewhere in a farmhouse far down the road—a long, agonised wailing, as if from fear. The sound was taken up by another dog, and then another and another, till, borne on the wind which now sighed softly through the Pass, a wild howling began, which seemed to come from all over the country, as far as the imagination could grasp it through the gloom of the night. At the first howl the horses began to strain and rear, but the driver spoke to them soothingly, and they quieted down, but shivered and sweated as though after a runaway from sudden fright. Then, far off in the distance, from the mountains on each side of us began a louder and sharper howling—that of wolves—which affected both the horses and myself in the same way—for I was minded to jump from the calèche and run, whilst they reared again and plunged madly, so that the driver had to use all his great strength to keep them from bolting. In a few minutes, however, my own ears got accustomed to the sound, and the horses so far became quiet that the driver was able to descend and to stand before them. He petted and soothed them, and whispered something in their ears, as I have heard of horse-tamers doing, and with extraordinary effect, for under his caresses they became quite manageable again, though they still trembled. The driver again took his seat, and shaking his reins, started off at a great pace. This time, after going to the far side of the Pass, he suddenly turned down a narrow roadway which ran sharply to the right.
Soon we were hemmed in with trees, which in places arched right over the roadway till we passed as through a tunnel; and again great frowning rocks guarded us boldly on either side. Though we were in shelter, we could hear the rising wind, for it moaned and whistled through the rocks, and the branches of the trees crashed together as we swept along. It grew colder and colder still, and fine powdery snow began to fall, so that soon we and all around us were covered with a white blanket. The keen wind still carried the howling of the dogs, though this grew fainter as we went on our way. The baying of the wolves sounded nearer and nearer, as though they were closing round on us from every side. I grew dreadfully afraid, and the horses shared my fear; but the driver was not in the least disturbed. He kept turning his head to left and right, but I could not see anything through the darkness.
Suddenly, away on our left, I saw a faint flickering blue flame. The driver saw it at the same moment; he at once checked the horses and, jumping to the ground, disappeared into the darkness. I did not know what to do, the less as the howling of the wolves grew closer; but while I wondered the driver suddenly appeared again, and without a word took his seat, and we resumed our journey. I think I must have fallen asleep and kept dreaming of the incident, for it seemed to be repeated endlessly, and now, looking back, it is like a sort of awful nightmare. Once the flame appeared so near the road that even in the darkness around us I could watch the driver’s motions. He went rapidly to where the blue flame rose—it must have been very faint, for it did not seem to illumine the place around it at all—and gathering a few stones, formed them into some device. Once there appeared a strange optical effect: when he stood between me and the flame he did not obstruct it, for I could see its ghostly flicker all the same. This startled me, but as the effect was only momentary, I took it that my eyes deceived me straining through the darkness. Then for a time there were no blue flames, and we sped onwards through the gloom, with the howling of the wolves around us, as though they were following in a moving circle.
At last there came a time when the driver went further afield than he had yet done, and during his absence the horses began to tremble worse than ever and to snort and scream with fright. I could not see any cause for it, for the howling of the wolves had ceased altogether; but just then the moon, sailing through the black clouds, appeared behind the jagged crest of a beetling, pine-clad rock, and by its light I saw around us a ring of wolves, with white teeth and lolling red tongues, with long, sinewy limbs and shaggy hair. They were a hundred times more terrible in the grim silence which held them than even when they howled. For myself, I felt a sort of paralysis of fear. It is only when a man feels himself face to face with such horrors that he can understand their true import.
All at once the wolves began to howl as though the moonlight had had some peculiar effect on them. The horses jumped about and reared, and looked helplessly round with eyes that rolled in a way painful to see; but the living ring of terror encompassed them on every side, and they had perforce to remain within it. I called to the coachman to come, for it seemed to me that our only chance was to try to break out through the ring and to aid his approach. I shouted and beat the side of the calèche, hoping by the noise to scare the wolves from that side, so as to give him a chance of reaching the trap. How he came there, I know not, but I heard his voice raised in a tone of imperious command, and looking towards the sound, saw him stand in the roadway. As he swept his long arms, as though brushing aside some impalpable obstacle, the wolves fell back and back further still. Just then a heavy cloud passed across the face of the moon, so that we were again in darkness.
When I could see again the driver was climbing into the calèche, and the wolves had disappeared. This was all so strange and uncanny that a dreadful fear came upon me, and I was afraid to speak or move. The time seemed interminable as we swept on our way, now in almost complete darkness, for the rolling clouds obscured the moon. We kept on ascending, with occasional periods of quick descent, but in the main always ascending. Suddenly I became conscious of the fact that the driver was in the act of pulling up the horses in the courtyard of a vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the moonlit sky.
