The Purple Cloud
Page 23
cruelly long time I would not cough, till it burst inhorrid clamour from my lips, sending crinkles of cold through my inmostblood. For with the words which I read were all mixed up visions ofcrawling hearses, wails, and lugubrious crapes, and piercing shrieks ofmadness in strange earthy vaults, and all the mournfulness of the blackVale of Death, and the tragedy of corruption. Twice during the ghostlyhours of that night the absolute and undeniable certainty that somepresence--some most gashly silent being--stood at my right elbow, sothrilled me, that I leapt to my feet to confront it with clenched fists,and hairs that bristled stiff in horror and frenzy. After that secondtime I must have fainted; for when it was broad day, I found my droppedhead over the file of papers, supported on my arms. And I resolved thennever again after sunset to remain in any house: for that night wasenough to kill a horse, my good God; and that this is a haunted planet Iknow.
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What I read in the _Times_ was not very definite, for how could it be?but in the main it confirmed inferences which I had myself drawn, andfairly satisfied my mind.
There had been a battle royal in the paper between my old collaboratorProfessor Stanistreet and Dr. Martin Rogers, and never could I haveconceived such an indecorous piece of business, men like them callingone another 'tyro,' 'dreamer,' and in one place 'block-head.'Stanistreet denied that the perfumed odour of almonds attributed to theadvancing cloud could be due to anything but the excited fancy of thereporting fugitives, because, said he, it was unknown that either Cn,HCn, or K_4FeCn_6 had been given out by volcanoes, and thedestructiveness to life of the travelling cloud could only be owing toCO and CO_2. To this Rogers, in an article characterised byextraordinary heat, replied that he could not understand how even a'tyro'(!) in chemical and geological phenomena would venture to rushinto print with the statement that HCn had not commonly been given outby volcanoes: that it _had_ been, he said, was perfectly certain; thoughwhether it had been or not could not affect the decision of a reasoningmind as to whether it was being: for that cyanogen, as a matter of fact,was not rare in nature, though not directly occurring, being one of theproducts of the common distillation of pit-coal, and found in roots,peaches, almonds, and many tropical flora; also that it had beenactually pointed out as probable by more than one thinker that some saltor salts of Cn, the potassic, or the potassic ferrocyanide, or both,must exist in considerable stores in the earth at volcanic depths. Inreply to this, Stanistreet in a two-column article used the word'dreamer,' and Rogers, when Berlin had been already silenced, finallyreplied with his amazing 'block-head.' But, in my opinion, by far themost learned and lucid of the scientific dicta was from the ratherunexpected source of Sloggett, of the Dublin Science and Art Department:he, without fuss, accepted the statements of the fugitive eye-witnesses,down to the assertion that the cloud, as it rolled travelling, seemedmixed from its base to the clouds with languid tongues of purple flame,rose-coloured at their edges. This, Sloggett explained, was thecharacteristic flame of both cyanogen and hydrocyanic acid vapour,which, being inflammable, may have become locally ignited in the passageover cities, and only burned in that limited and languid way on accountof the ponderous volumes of carbonic anhydride with which they must, ofcourse, be mixed: the dark empurpled colour was due to the presence oflarge quantities of the scoriae of the trappean rocks: basalts,green-stone, trachytes, and the various porphyries. This article wasmost remarkable for its clear divination, because written so early--notlong, in fact, after the cessation of telegraphic communication withAustralia and China; and at a date so early Sloggett stated that thecharacter of the devastation not only proved an eruption--another, butfar greater Krakatoa--probably in some South Sea region, but indicatedthat its most active product must be, not CO, but potassic ferrocyanide(K_4FeCn_6), which, undergoing distillation with the products of sulphurin the heat of eruption, produced hydrocyanic acid (HCn); and thisvolatile acid, he said, remaining in a vaporous state in all climatesabove a temperature of 26.5 deg. C., might involve the entire earth, if theeruption proved sufficiently powerful, travelling chiefly in a directioncontrary to the earth's west-to-east motion, the only regions whichwould certainly be exempt being the colder regions of the Arcticcircles, where the vapour of the acid would assume the liquid state, andfall as rain. He did not anticipate that vegetation would be permanentlyaffected, unless the eruption were of inconceivable duration andactivity, for though the poisonous quality of hydrocyanic acid consistedin its sudden and complete arrest of oxidation, vegetation had twosources of life--the soil as well as the air; with this exception, alllife, down to the lowest evolutionary forms, would disappear (here wasthe one point in which he was somewhat at fault), until the earthreproduced them. For the rest, he fixed the rate of the on-coming cloudat from 100 to 105 miles a day; and the date of eruption, either the14th, 15th, or 16th of April--which was either one, two, or three daysafter the arrival of the _Boreal_ party at the Pole; and he concluded bysaying that, if the facts were as he had stated them, then he couldsuggest no hiding-place for the race of man, unless such places as minesand tunnels could be made air-tight; nor could even they be of use toany considerable number, except in the event of the poisonous state ofthe air being of very short duration.
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I had thought of mines before: but in a very languid way, till thisarticle, and other things that I read, as it were struck my brain a slapwith the notion. For 'there,' I said, 'if anywhere, shall I find aman....'
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I went out from that building that morning feeling like a man bowed downwith age, for the depths of unutterable horror into which I had hadglimpses during that one night made me very feeble, and my stepstottered, and my brain reeled.
I got out into Farringdon Street, and at the near Circus, where fourstreets meet, had under my furthest range of vision nothing but fourfields of bodies, bodies, clad in a rag-shop of every faded colour, orhalf-clad, or not clad at all, actually, in many cases, over-lying oneanother, as I had seen at Reading, but here with a markedly moreskeleton appearance: for I saw the swollen-looking shoulders, sharphips, hollow abdomens, and stiff bony limbs of people dead from famine,the whole having the grotesque air of some _macabre_ battle-field offallen marionettes. Mixed with these was an extraordinary number ofvehicles of all sorts, so that I saw that driving among them would beimpracticable, whereas the street which I had taken during the nightwas fairly clear. I thought a minute what I should do: then went by aparallel back-street, and came out to a shop in the Strand, where Ihoped to find all the information which I needed about the excavationsof the country. The shutters were up, and I did not wish to make anynoise among these people, though the morning was bright, it being aboutten o'clock, and it was easy to effect entrance, for I saw a crow-bar ina big covered furniture-van near. I, therefore, went northward, till Icame to the British Museum, the cataloguing-system of which I knew well,and passed in. There was no one at the library-door to bid me stop, andin the great round reading-room not a soul, except one old man with abag of goitre hung at his neck, and spectacles, he lying up abook-ladder near the shelves, a 'reader' to the last. I got to theprinted catalogues, and for an hour was upstairs among the dim sacredgalleries of this still place, and at the sight of certain Greek andCoptic papyri, charters, seals, had such a dream of this ancient earth,my good God, as even an angel's pen could not half express on paper.Afterwards, I went away loaded with a good hundred-weight ofOrdnance-maps, which I had stuffed into a bag found in the cloak-room,with three topographical books; I then, at an instrument-maker's inHolborn, got a sextant and theodolite, and at a grocer's near the riverput into a sack-bag provisions to last me a week or two; at BlackfriarsBridge wharf-station I found a little sharp white steamer of a few tons,which happily was driven by liquid air, so that I had no troublesomefire to light: and by noon I was cutting my solitary way up the Thames,which flowed as before the ancient Britons were born, and saw it, andbuilt mud-huts there amid the pri
maeval forest; and afterwards theRomans came, and saw it, and called it Tamesis, or Thamesis.
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That night, as I lay asleep on the cabin-cushions of my little boatunder the lee of an island at Richmond, I had a clear dream, in whichsomething, or someone, came to me, and asked me a question: for it said:'Why do you go seeking another man?--that you may fall upon him, andkiss him? or that you may fall upon him, and murder him?' And I answeredsullenly in my dream: 'I would not murder him. I do not wish to murderanyone.'
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What was essential to me was to know, with certainty, whether I wasreally alone: for some instinct began to whisper me: 'Find that out: besure, be sure: for without the assurance you can never be--yourself.'
I passed into the great