Description
Otto of the Silver Hand
I. The Dragon’s House.
Up from the gray rocks, rising sheer and bold and bare, stood the walls
and towers of Castle Drachenhausen. A great gate-way, with a heavy
iron-pointed portcullis hanging suspended in the dim arch above, yawned
blackly upon the bascule or falling drawbridge that spanned a chasm
between the blank stone walls and the roadway that winding down the
steep rocky slope to the little valley just beneath. There in the lap of
the hills around stood the wretched straw-thatched huts of the peasants
belonging to the castle–miserable serfs who, half timid, half fierce,
tilled their poor patches of ground, wrenching from the hard soil barely
enough to keep body and soul together. Among those vile hovels played
the little children like foxes about their dens, their wild, fierce eyes
peering out from under a mat of tangled yellow hair.
Beyond these squalid huts lay the rushing, foaming river, spanned by a
high, rude, stone bridge where the road from the castle crossed it, and
beyond the river stretched the great, black forest, within whose gloomy
depths the savage wild beasts made their lair, and where in winter time
the howling wolves coursed their flying prey across the moonlit snow and
under the net-work of the black shadows from the naked boughs above.
Product ID: 9781776765522
Sku: 9781776765522
