for a short moment ere fading. For, friend John, hardly had my knife
severed the head of each, before the whole body began to melt away and
crumble in to its native dust, as though the death that should have come
centuries agone had at last assert himself and say at once and loud I
am here!
Before I left the castle I so fixed its entrances that never more can
the Count enter there Un-Dead.
When I stepped into the circle where Madam Mina slept, she woke from her
sleep, and, seeing, me, cried out in pain that I had endured too much.
Come! she said, come away from this awful place! Let us go to meet my
husband who is, I know, coming towards us. She was looking thin and
pale and weak; but her eyes were pure and glowed with fervour. I was
glad to see her paleness and her illness, for my mind was full of the
fresh horror of that ruddy vampire sleep.
And so with trust and hope, and yet full of fear, we go eastward to meet
our friends--and _him_--whom Madam Mina tell me that she _know_ are
coming to meet us.
_Mina Harker s Journal._
_6 November._--It was late in the afternoon when the Professor and I
took our way towards the east whence I knew Jonathan was coming. We did
not go fast, though the way was steeply downhill, for we had to take
heavy rugs and wraps with us; we dared not face the possibility of being
left without warmth in the cold and the snow. We had to take some of our
provisions, too, for we were in a perfect desolation, and, so far as we
could see through the snowfall, there was not even the sign of
habitation. When we had gone about a mile, I was tired with the heavy
walking and sat down to rest. Then we looked back and saw where the
clear line of Dracula s castle cut the sky; for we were so deep under
the hill whereon it was set that the angle of perspective of the
Carpathian mountains was far below it. We saw it in all its grandeur,
perched a thousand feet on the summit of a sheer precipice, and with
seemingly a great gap between it and the steep of the adjacent mountain
on any side. There was something wild and uncanny about the place. We
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