for the rising ground.  The remnants of a mat showed that the place had once been inhabited, and close to the entrance were a few palm-trees loaded with fruit.  The instinct which binds men to life woke in his heart.  He now hoped to live until some Maugrabin should pass that way; possibly he might even hear the roar of cannon, for Bonaparte was at that time overrunning Egypt.  Encouraged by these thoughts, the Frenchman shook down a cluster of the ripe fruit under the weight of which the palms were bending; and as he tasted this unhoped-for manna, he thanked the former inhabitant of the grotto for the cultivation of the trees, which the rich and luscious flesh of the fruit amply attested.  Like a true Provencal, he passed from the gloom of despair to a joy that was half insane.  He ran back to the top of the hill, and busied himself for the rest of the day in cutting down one of the sterile trees which had been his shelter the night before.

Some vague recollection made him think of the wild beasts of the desert, and foreseeing that they would come to drink at a spring which bubbled through the sand at the foot of the rock, he resolved to protect his hermitage by felling a tree across the entrance.  Notwithstanding his eagerness, and the strength which the fear of being attacked while asleep gave to his muscles, he was unable to cut the palm-tree in pieces during the day; but he succeeded in bringing it down.  Towards evening the king of the desert fell; and the noise of his fall, echoing far, was like a moan from the breast of Solitude.  The soldier shuddered, as though he had heard a voice predicting evil.  But, like an heir who does not long mourn a parent, he stripped from the beautiful tree the arching green fronds—­its poetical adornment—­and made a bed of them in his refuge.  Then, tired with his work and by the heat of the day, he fell asleep beneath the red vault of the grotto.

In the middle of the night his sleep was broken by a strange noise.  He sat up; the deep silence that reigned everywhere enabled him to hear the alternating rhythm of a respiration whose savage vigor could not belong to a human being.  A terrible fear, increased by the darkness, by the silence, by the rush of his waking fancies, numbed his heart.  He felt the contraction of his hair, which rose on end as his eyes, dilating to their full strength, beheld through the darkness two faint amber lights.  At first he thought them an optical delusion; but by degrees the clearness of the night enabled him to distinguish objects in the grotto, and he saw, within two feet of him, an enormous animal lying at rest.