Deadfall

“ As the deep death-fraught sounds long lingering dwell
Sick to the heart of Love and Hope and Fear
Soul-jaundiced, I do loathe Life's upland steep
And with strange envy muse the dead man's dreamless sleep. ”

“ I fought to wrest my mouth from this awful Thing that sealed it, but, if ever I succeeded and caught a single breath, the wet, sucking mass closed over my face again before I could cry out. I think I fought for hours, desperately, insanely, in a silence that was more hideous than any sound,—fought until I felt final death at hand, until the memory of all my life rushed over me like a flood, until I no longer had strength to wrench my face from that hellish succubus, until with a last mechanical struggle I fell and yielded to death. ”

“ There we knew men had fallen singly, and had long lain wounded or dead, until their friends had taken them to grave or shelter. Out in the open again, where skirmishes had happened and bill and bow or spear had met their like, the dead lay thicker. Gods! how drear those fair French fields did lie in the autumn moonlight, with their scattered dead in twos and threes and knots and clusters! There were some who sprawled upon the ground—still clutching in their dread white fingers the grass and earth torn up in the moment of their agony. ”

“ But lives and grows
Within us as a penetrating ray
Of sunshine on a crystal surface glows
With many-hued refraction. He has fled
Into the unknown silence of the night,
But cannot die till human hearts are dead. ”

“ We struggled with death during the whole of the night, holding firmly by the ropes which were made very secure.—Tossed by the waves from the back to the front, and from the front to the back, and sometimes precipitated into the sea; floating between life and death, mourning our misfortunes, certain of perishing; we disputed, nevertheless, the remainder of our existence, with that cruel element which threatened to engulf us. ”

“ Alas! thy latest voyage draws near a close,
For Death broods voiceless in the darkening sky;
Subsides the breeze; the untroubled waves repose;
The scene is peaceful all. Can Death be nigh,
When thus, mute and unarm'd, his vassals lie?
Mark ye that cloud! There toils the imprisoned gale ”

“ And a man with death's dews on his forehead, and blood on his coat and his cheek;
"I am dying — I feel death upon me — but yet, even yet, if God wills
I may crawl on my knees to the doctor's — yes, this is the last of the hills! ”

“ Like Death's own horrible hands:
His quest leads under haunted skies
To haunted lands.
He rides with fire upon his casque,
And fire upon his spear,
The roadway of his soul's set task,
Without a fear.
Right steels the sinews of his steed,
And tempers his straight sword:
He rides the causeway of his creed
Without a word. ”

“ There lay the ghastly dead, cold and pale in the grey light of the morning,—across them in heaps the wounded, quivering with intensity of agony, grasping the gory ground with convulsive clutches, and tearing up the earth, which was soon to cover them, in handfuls, while their eyes, starting from the sockets, were becoming glazed and terrible in death. ”

“ When wearied and wounded to death he sinks down there; once more is heard completed, as if 'twere ghostly tones from the far off unapproachable distance, that dream-like melody for the first time ringing out full and perfect in death, and the notes fade and die softly, as the life-blood ebbs away. ”

“ Death amid the smoke, and excitement, and glory of battle, was not half so terrible as in the awful calmness and chill horror of the scaffold! And sadder yet, to think of my friends, who would count the weary months that had gone by, and wish and long for my return, till hope became torturing suspense, and suspense deepened into despair. ”

“ The mad pulse beat back the baffled life with a low sob.
And so the stark and naked soul unfolded its wings to the dimness of Death!
A lonely, unknown Death.
A Death that left this dumb living body as his endless mark. ”

“ Next he dragged a dying woman over on top of me, and, with much squeezing and shoving, crawled in beside me and partly over me. A mound of dead and dying began to pile up over us, and over this mound, pawing and moaning, crept those that still survived. ”

“ I seem to
"walk through a deep valley, far from the light of
"day, alone and comfortless! The damps of death
"fall thick upon me! Horrors stare me in the face!
"I look behind, there is no returning; Death follows
"after me; I walk in regions of Death, where no
"tree is; without a lantern to direct my steps,
"without a staff to support me."—Thus he laments
through the still evening, till the curtains of darkness
were drawn! Like the sound of a broken
pipe, the aged woman raised her voice. ”

“ Only the dead with hands uplifted, the dead in frozen rest, the dead with the smile of death, or the hate of death, or the terror of death written upon their faces, seemed to watch and to wait in the chamber of the sepulchre. ”

“ Such familiarity with death may harden some natures—surely there was the semblance of utter callousness of heart in many such scenes, where dead men were hurried into the graves with scarce a foot of earth above the rotting clay. ”

“ They shall bring thee down to the pit, and thou shalt die the deaths of them that are slain in the midst of the sea.—They shall bring thee down to a dishonored oblivion, and materially and religiously thou shalt die the deaths of those slain in the roaring waves of anarchy. ”

“ Alas, the sun rose upon a shore strown with wrecks, and blackened with the bodies of the dead! If the eye alighted upon the living, it every where settled upon a group of mourners. Death had gone like a gleaner through the land, and taken an ear from every field. ”

“ That sinister countenance seemed to him to presage some approaching calamity.
Thus, there are men whom fate has marked on the forehead with a fatal stamp. The mysterious sign is not displayed at every time and before all; but at certain epochs of life, when the unknown breath caresses the predestinated or cursed head, the mark all at once appeals, like a tawny light in the depth of night.
A curse! Fatality has moulded that man's brain, it has left its potent impress on his skull. ”

“ Wave rolling after wave was all that answered back again.
But night and morn and noon they prayed—oh blessed voice of prayer!
That God would bring their trembling souls out of this great despair.
Again the fatal die was cast; a man of powerful frame
Slowly and with reluctant step to the dread summons came.
Large drops of anguish on his brow—his lips were white with fear—
Oh 'tis a dreadful death to die! Is there no succor near? ”

“ Die, die, die, die, death comes to all." Destruction faces us wherever we turn. Destruction below and above, destruction behind and before. Change is the only Eternal,—why not as welcome Death as Life? ”

“ The wild desolation of the spot, the great beams a risin’ out of the rocks with the seven dead bodies a hangin’ up in the air—left there to die of hunger and agony,—with the slow death of agonizin’ horrer wrote out on their dead faces and their stiffened forms. ”

“ For near at hand there lay such countless woes, Such up-heaped horrors as no tongue can tell, Where helpless Pity's ineffectual throes Made that long shambles seem one ghastly hell, And all the broken, battered, blood-stained rows Of dead seem blessed in that they sleep so well ”

“ Since the period of which I now write, I have often witnessed the closing scene of mortality, and various are the opinions I have heard, as to which point of time, between the moment of death and the first appearance abroad of the survivors in their mourning apparel, is the saddest, the most afflicting, or the most trying—whether the moment of dissolution, the first appearance of the undertaker, the laying out in the apparel of death, the bringing of the coffin, the last frantic kiss and look, the screwing down, the carrying out, the dull thud of the clay upon the coffin lid. ”

“ Death his death’s wound shall then receive, and stoop
Inglorious, of his mortal sting disarmed;
I through the ample air in triumph high
Shall lead Hell captive maugre Hell, and show
The powers of darkness bound. Thou, at the sight
Pleased, out of Heaven shalt look down and smile,
While, by thee raised, I ruin all my foes;
Death last, and with his carcase glut the grave ”

“ The heart-wreck caused by the sudden departure of so many can be open only to one eye, and that the All-Seeing. Think of one family of fourteen all dead except one, and that the wife and mother, and she the witness of their drowning. ”

“ Who die and leave no lament on the wind. . . .
And straightway gazing on him I beheld
Not death's magnificence; not fame's hushed tomb—
But grim Oblivion, and the fields of France!
And on some nameless hillside, where the night
Sets out wild flaming candles for the dead,
Innumerable corpses palely sprawled
Beneath the silent, cold, anonymous stars. ”

“ What sort of death would one meet with widely-opened eyes, parted lips, and brows bent as though to rally fast-flying courage? Not a peaceful death surely. I brought my black coat to my aid. "My dear lady, you must not think of such things. Death is but a sleep, you know. Why anticipate a nightmare?" ”

“ Death thou hast seen In his first shape on Man; but many shapes Of Death, and many are the ways that lead To his grim cave, all dismal; yet to sense More terrible at the entrance, than within. Some, as thou sawest, by violent stroke shall die; By fire, flood, famine, by intemperance more In meats and drinks, which on the earth shall bring Diseases dire, of which a monstrous crew Before thee shall appear; that thou mayest know What misery the inabstinence of Eve Shall bring on Men. ”

“ For whether in mid sea or 'mong the breakers of the farther shore, a wreck at last must mark the end of each and all. And every life, no matter if its every hour is rich with love and every moment jeweled with a joy, will, at its close, become a tragedy as sad and deep and dark as can be woven of the warp and woof of mystery and death. ”

“ And the realization of death, in the revolt of one’s whole being, is invested with a special horror—that of being crushed and pulverized, of being not even a dead man, but a nameless heap, a handful of fleshly dust. ”

“ Upon the tangled grass.—But then there came
The damp clod harshly on the coffin-lid,
Curdling the life-blood at the mourner's heart,
While audibly it spake to every ear
"There is a time to die." ”

“ His eyes with the hollow sockets stare round with an empty chillness.
He bears a scythe in his hands. It is Death with his icy message.
Clutching the bulky book, the host is in peaceful slumber,
When Death draws near to him softly, and peacefully near him lingers. ”

“ Strong as dying men sometimes are in the last flickering up of life in the speedily dissolving frame, the lowering of this trap, and, above all, the drawing of it back into place, which I instinctively felt would be the hardest act of the two, would be beyond the utmost fire or force conceivable in a dying man. No, even if he, as a member of the family, knew of this subterranean retreat, he could not have made use of it. I did not even accept the possibility sufficiently to approach the place again with this new inquiry in mind. ”

“ Corpses, floating round untrodden
Cliffs, where nought but sea-drift strays;
Souls of dead men, in whose faces
Of humanity no trace is —
Not a mark to show their races —
Floating round for days and days. ”

“ Amid all this horror, the sight of ghastly death, and the ravings of delirium, whilst some brave souls devoted themselves to the assistance of the suffering and dying, crowds of others rushed to taverns, theatres, and places of debauch, and a strange maniacal mirth startled the silence of the night, and added horror to the work of death. ”

“ Dead, and at full length he lay, enshrouded—the genius and the demon of the scene. Alas! he bore no portion in our mirth, save that his countenance distorted with the plague, and his eyes in which Death had but half extinguished the fire of the pestilence, seemed to take such interest in our merriment as the dead may take in the merriment of those who are to die. ”

“ Fulfils with awe the soul's despair unweeping:
Myriads of habitants are ever sleeping,
⁠Or dead, or fled from nameless pestilence!
Yet as in some necropolis you find
⁠Perchance one mourner to a thousand dead,
So there: worn faces that look deaf and blind
⁠Like tragic masks of stone.With weary tread,
Each wrapt in his own doom, they wander, wander,
Or sit foredone and desolately ponder
⁠Through sleepless hours with heavy drooping head. ”

“ When dawn was come all those starving peasants may well have stood before the high impregnable walls in the broad daylight of despair. Even their nightmares during the night, of unearthly necromancers looking down at them from the battlements and with signs and spells paralysing all their potential toils, may well have been a sort of pessimistic consolation, anticipating and accounting for failure. ”

“ Every one of these breaks in your lifeline shows a moment when you stood face to face with death. Ah, señor, in all my experience I have never seen such an adventurous palm.... You have stood elbow to elbow with death, and yet those little squares about the breaks show a guiding spirit of protection. ”

“ Turning in our saddles, by the flare of our torches held high above our heads we beheld three corpses swaying in the wind. A wailing cry of a woman's voice came from close at hand, and we fled as if pursued by a thousand demons. ”