Chapter 2: Jonathan Harker's Journal

I must have been asleep, for certainly if I had been fully awake I must have noticed the approach of such a remarkable place. In the gloom the courtyard looked of considerable size, surrounded by the great mountains of the Carpathians (car-PAY-thee-ans), and as I stumbled through the passage it seemed to me that the sheer rock-walls of the castle shut out the sky on every side.

He was a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of colour about him anywhere. He held in his hand an antique silver lamp, in which the flame burned without a chimney or globe of any kind, throwing long, quivering shadows as it flickered in the draught of the open door.

He stretched out his hand and, with a strength that was surprising, he gripped my own with a force which made me wince, an effect which was not lessened by the fact that it seemed cold as ice—more like the hand of a dead than a living man.

As he spoke, he smiled, and the lamplight fell on a hard-looking mouth, with very red lips and sharp-looking white teeth, as white as ivory. It was a cruel-looking mouth, but his manners were of the most courtly grace.