Sometimes for two, three, four minutes,
the profound interest of what I read would fix my mind, and then I would
peruse an entire column, or two, without consciousness of the meaning of
one single word, my brain all drawn away to the innumerable host of the
wan dead that camped about me, pierced with horror lest they should
start, and stand, and accuse me: for the grave and the worm was the
world; and in the air a sickening stirring of cerements and shrouds; and
the taste of the pale and insubstantial grey of ghosts seemed to infect
my throat, and faint odours of the loathsome tomb my nostrils, and the
toll of deep-toned passing-bells my ears; finally the lamp smouldered
very low, and my charnel fancy teemed with the screwing-down of coffins,
lych-gates and sextons, and the grating of ropes that lower down the
dead, and the first sound of the earth upon the lid of that strait and
gloomy home of the mortal; that lethal look of cold dead fingers I
seemed to see before me, the insipidness of dead tongues, the pout of
the drowned, and the vapid froths that ridge their lips, till my flesh
was moist as with the stale washing-waters of morgues and mortuaries,
and with such sweats as corpses sweat, and the mawkish tear that lies
on dead men's cheeks; for what is one poor insignificant man in his
flesh against a whole world of the disembodied, he alone with them, and
nowhere, nowhere another of his kind, to whom to appeal against them? I
read, and I searched: but God, God knows .
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