midnight
Leave me ! '' Waiting no further licence , the three vanished ; but , ere he quitted the vault , Elias turned back his scowling countenance on Almamen -LRB- who had sunk again into an absorbed meditation -RRB- with a glance of vindictive ire -- Almamen was alone . In less than a quarter of an hour Ximen returned to seek his master ; but the place was again deserted . It was midnight in the streets of Granada -- midnight , but not repose . The multitude , roused into one of their paroyxsms of wrath and sorrow , by the reflection that the morrow was indeed the day of their subjection to the Christian foe , poured forth through the streets to the number of twenty thousand . It was a wild and stormy night ; those formidable gusts of wind , which sometimes sweep in sudden winter from the snows of the Sierra Nevada , howled through the tossing groves , and along the winding streets . But the tempest seemed to heighten , as if by the sympathy of the elements , the popular storm and whirlwind .