So, When I Saw The Council-Room To Which Such Prisoners Were
Taken For Examination, And The Door By Which They Passed Out, When
They Were Condemned--A Door That Never Closed Upon A Man With Life
And Hope Before Him--My Heart Appeared To Die Within Me.
It was smitten harder though, when, torch in hand, I descended from
the cheerful day into two ranges, one below another, of dismal,
awful, horrible stone cells.
They were quite dark. Each had a
loop-hole in its massive wall, where, in the old time, every day, a
torch was placed--I dreamed--to light the prisoner within, for half
an hour. The captives, by the glimmering of these brief rays, had
scratched and cut inscriptions in the blackened vaults. I saw
them. For their labour with a rusty nail's point, had outlived
their agony and them, through many generations.
One cell, I saw, in which no man remained for more than four-and-
twenty hours; being marked for dead before he entered it. Hard by,
another, and a dismal one, whereto, at midnight, the confessor
came--a monk brown-robed, and hooded--ghastly in the day, and free
bright air, but in the midnight of that murky prison, Hope's
extinguisher, and Murder's herald. I had my foot upon the spot,
where, at the same dread hour, the shriven prisoner was strangled;
and struck my hand upon the guilty door--low-browed and stealthy--
through which the lumpish sack was carried out into a boat, and
rowed away, and drowned where it was death to cast a net.
Around this dungeon stronghold, and above some part of it: licking
the rough walls without, and smearing them with damp and slime
within: stuffing dank weeds and refuse into chinks and crevices,
as if the very stones and bars had mouths to stop: furnishing a
smooth road for the removal of the bodies of the secret victims of
the State--a road so ready that it went along with them, and ran
before them, like a cruel officer--flowed the same water that
filled this Dream of mine, and made it seem one, even at the time.
Descending from the palace by a staircase, called, I thought, the
Giant's--I had some imaginary recollection of an old man
abdicating, coming, more slowly and more feebly, down it, when he
heard the bell, proclaiming his successor--I glided off, in one of
the dark boats, until we came to an old arsenal guarded by four
marble lions. To make my Dream more monstrous and unlikely, one of
these had words and sentences upon its body, inscribed there, at an
unknown time, and in an unknown language; so that their purport was
a mystery to all men.
There was little sound of hammers in this place for building ships,
and little work in progress; for the greatness of the city was no
more, as I have said. Indeed, it seemed a very wreck found
drifting on the sea; a strange flag hoisted in its honourable
stations, and strangers standing at its helm.
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