Midnight
Now was the moment to fight for sleep in contempt of him , and they began by simulating an entry into the fortress they were to defend , plunging on their pillows , battening down their eyelids , breathing with a dreadful regularity . Alas ! it came to their knowledge that the Bell was in possession and they the besiegers . Every resonant quarter was anticipated up to the blow , without averting its murderous abruptness ; and an executioner Midnight that sounded , in addition to the reiterated quarters , four and twenty ringing hammerstrokes , with the aching pause between the twelves , left them the prey of the legions of torturers which are summed , though not described , in the title of a sleepless night . From that period the curse was milder , but the victims raged . They swam on vasty deeps , they knocked at rusty gates , they shouldered all the weapons of black Insomnia 's armoury and became her soldiery , doing her will upon themselves . Of her originally sprang the inspired teaching of the doom of men to excruciation in endlessness .