Then the outer world all awoke to life; the streets were thronged, fleets of galleys came forth from their moorings, and the sounds of labor and of pleasure, of toil and revelry, arose into the darkened skies.

Then the city was a city of the living, no longer silent, but full of bustle, and the caverns were frequented but little.

This cavern life was only tolerable during the light season, when the sun-glare was over the land; but now, when the beneficent and grateful darkness pervaded all things, the outer world was infinitely more agreeable.
To me, however, the arrival of the dark season brought only additional gloom.

I could not get rid of the thought that I was reserved for some horrible fate, in which Almah might also be involved.

We were both aliens here, in a nation of kind-hearted and amiable miscreants--of generous, refined, and most self-denying fiends; of men who were highly civilized, yet utterly wrong-headed and irreclaimable in their blood-thirsty cruelty.