"At high noon."

"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!"