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The lowest dungeon was inhabited by those prisoners who were foreigners, and whose treatment was more severe than that of the Americans. "The inhabitants of this lower region were the most miserable and disgusting looking objects that can be conceived. Daily washing in salt water, together with their extreme emaciation, caused the skin to appear like dried parchment.
One of the ladies was past the age, but not the fashion, of youth, and her Parisian dress clung over her wasted figure and well-bred bones artistically if not gracefully; the younger lady, evidently her daughter, was crisp and pretty, and carried off the aquiline nose and aristocratic emaciation of her mother with a certain piquancy and a dash that was charming.
I saw one small boy walking in front of me with a curious, unsteady gait, and just as I drew level with him he pitched forward on to his face without a sound. He was stone-dead when I turned him over; and judging by the terrible emaciation of his body he had died of protracted starvation.
Although, in the ashy pallor of the lips and brow, and the fixed, serene, almost stern aspect of the immovable face, might be read unmistakable evidence of an exhausting and dangerous constitutional shock to the system, yet none of that emaciation, over which broods the shadow of the angel of death, resulting from protracted illness, was there to be seen.
Caius, who saw this disease, mentions the viscidity, as well as the quantity of these sweats, and adds, that the extremities were often cold, when the internal parts were burnt up with heat and thirst, with great and speedy emaciation and debility: there is great reason to believe, that the fluids were absorbed from the cells of the body by the cellular and cystic branches of the lymphatics, and poured on the skin by the retrograde motions of the cutaneous ones.
It is well understood that fat may disappear with great rapidity under certain conditions; many maladies are accompanied by speedy emaciation; therefore, as fat never passes into the secretions, at least not in appreciable quantities, it probably undergoes transformation, perhaps by oxidation or a form of fermentation, the final results of which are, directly or indirectly, water and cadaveric acid.
He felt forced to return to her apartments, to go on tiptoe to the door of the chamber, in order to be sure that she was there. Her emaciation was frightful; it had no limits. When it seemed that it must stop, it still surprised them with new shrinking, as if after the disappearance of her flesh, her poor skeleton was melting away.
She turned the lamp higher, moving it so that its ray fell upon Guy. And in that moment she saw Death in his face. . . . She felt as if a quiet and very steady Hand had been laid upon her, checking all agitation. Calmly she bent over the bared arm he thrust forth to her. Unflinchingly she ran the needle into the white flesh, noting with a detached sort of pity his emaciation.
It kept the boys straight and strong. Close after came a month or so on the Yorktown peninsula with that master of strategic ruse, Magruder, but solely in the dreariest hardships of war, minus all the grander sorts that yield glory; rains, bad food, ill-chosen camps, freshets, terrible roads, horses sick and raw-boned, chills, jaundice, emaciation, barely an occasional bang at the enemy on reconnoissances and picketings, and marches and countermarches through blistering noons and skyless nights, with men, teams, and guns trying to see which could stagger the worst, along with columns of infantry mutinously weary of forever fortifying and never fighting.
Was he himself certain, or was he merely moved by the strong resemblance he saw, in spite of long illness and consequent emaciation? Was the visiting surgeon right in believing that the little depression in the skull had caused a suspension of memory? Such things happened, no doubt, but it also happened that doctors were mistaken and that nothing came of such operations. Who could prove the truth?
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