Along this
wall he was to creep on hands and knees while the
sentinel was looking in the opposite direction, lying
flat upon the masonry whenever the man turned
towards him. At the southeast corner was a half-ruined
turret. It was upheld, to some extent, by
a thick growth of ivy; but great masses of crumbling
stone had fallen inward and lay in the courtyard,
heaped against the wall. From this turret
he was to climb down by the ivy and the heaps of
stone into the courtyard; and, softly opening the
unlocked gate, to make his way along the passage
to a subterranean tunnel communicating with it.
Centuries ago this tunnel had formed a secret corridor
between the fortress and a tower on the
neighbouring hill; now it was quite disused and
blocked in many places by the falling in of the
rocks. No one but the smugglers knew of a certain
carefully-hidden hole in the mountain-side
which they had bored through to the tunnel; no
one suspected that stores of forbidden merchandise
were often kept, for weeks together, under
the very ramparts of the fortress itself, while the
customs-officers were vainly searching the houses
of the sullen, wrathful-eyed mountaineers.
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