midnight
Clementina once asked the coachman what these crosses might mean and repented doing so immediately afterwards , for he informed her that they marked the places where unlucky travellers had come by an untimely death ; the inscriptions were the records of the tragic romances through the scene of which they were passing . The valleys grew narrower and narrower , the road wound upward among precipices , and the loquacious coachman attached horrible stories to every rock and ruin . Each valley seemed to have its own particular ghost . Here and there by the roadside stood silent houses not one of which had an inviting appearance , it would never have occurred to a human soul to knock at any of them , even at midnight , to ask for a night 's lodging . They were all of them sooty dilapidated shanties , which might easily have been taken for stables , consisting of a single room in which the whole family lived , livestock and all . The church often lay far away from the settlement as if it belonged to two villages equally . Then the road rose again between bare and barren cliffs , where only here and there a solitary bush seemed to cling to the rocky wall .