midnight
Her single spark of light through the half-veiled lantern passed as swiftly as a shooting-star across the plateau . And as she felt the hours steal on -- so fast , so hideously fast -- with that horrible relentlessness which tarries for no despair , as it hastens for no desire , her lips grew dry as dust , her tongue clove to the roof of her mouth , the blood beat like a thousand hammers on her brain . What she dreaded came . Midway in her course , when , by the stars , she knew midnight was passed , the animal strained with hard-drawn , panting gasps to answer the demand made on him by the spur and by the lance-shaft with which he was goaded onward . In the lantern light she saw his head stretched out in the racing agony , his distended eyeballs , his neck covered with foam and blood , his heaving flanks that seemed bursting with every throb that his heart gave ; she knew that , half a league more forced from him , he would drop like a dead thing never to rise again . She let the bridle drop upon the poor beast 's neck , and threw her arms above her head with a shrill , wailing cry , whose despair echoed over the noiseless plains like the cry of a shot-stricken animal . She saw it all : the breaking of the rosy , golden day ; the stillness of the hushed camp ; the tread of the few picked men ; the open coffin by the open grave ; the leveled carbines gleaming in the first rays of the sun ... She had seen it so many times -- seen it to the awful end , when the living man fell down in the morning light a shattered , senseless , soulless , crushed-out mass .