"Now then, I will tell you what to say." I paused, and stood over that cowering lad a
whole minute in awful silence; then, in a voice deep, measured, charged with doom, I
began, and rose by dramatically graded stages to my colossal climax, which I delivered in
as sublime and noble a way as ever I did such a thing in my life: "Go back and tell the
king that at that hour I will smother the whole world in the dead blackness of midnight; I
will blot out the sun, and he shall never shine again; the fruits of the earth shall rot for
lack of light and warmth, and the peoples of the earth shall famish and die, to the last
man!"
I had to carry the boy out myself, he sunk into such a collapse. I handed him over to the
soldiers, and went back.
