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Vast crater rings overspread its surface, and in some of these I imagined I could perceive a lurid illumination coming out of their deepest cavities, and the curling of mephitic vapors around their terrible jaws. We were approaching that part of the moon which is known to the astronomers as the Bay of Rainbows.

Do you look to it that he does not escape." The heat in the room had become intolerable. From the grimy ceiling an oil-lamp, flickering low, threw lurid, ruddy lights on tricolour cockades, on hands that seemed red with the blood of innocent victims of lust and hate, and on faces glowing with desire and with anticipated savage triumph. "Who is the informer?" asked Roger at last.

The muffled sound of hammering as of nails in a coffin was going on all around him, and occasionally it seemed to him that something big and heavy stalked across the floor; but in spite of the fact that the room was illuminated with a red glow the same lurid red as had appeared in tests one and two nothing was to be seen.

For the past month a circus, now exhibiting in a neighboring town, had been advertised in glowing prose and lurid pictures on big billboards all over the county. Juvenile Fairview was set on fire anew with the circus fever. Andy's rope-walking feat and double somersault act from desk to desk that morning had resulted, getting him into the trouble of his life.

Thus settled on the north of Africa the lurid phantom of the Arabian crescent, one horn reaching to the Bosphorus and one pointing beyond the Pyrenees. For a while it seemed that the portentous meteor would increase to the full, and that all Europe would be enveloped.

It stopped above the city, and exploded in thunder, flashing over the whole horizon, but covering the Temple with a blaze which gave it the aspect of metal glowing in a furnace. Every pillar and pinnacle was seen with a lurid and terrible distinctness. The light vanished. I heard the roar of earthquake; the ground rose and heaved under my feet.

And all unconsciously one began to justify them by thoughts of the other incongruities of existence the strange, the passionate incongruities of youth and age, wealth and poverty, life and death; the wonderful odd bedfellows of this world; all those lurid contrasts which haunt a man's spirit till sometimes he is ready to cry out: "Rather than live where such things can be, let me die!"

So saying, he seized the mantle, threw it roughly over her shoulders, and dragged her on as before, half pleased with the finery, half frightened with the danger; while gradually died away, along the lurid air and the mournful streets, the chant of that most miserable mirth. For three days, the fatal three days, did Adrian remain bereft of strength and sense.

Between two bodies of guards, the condemned woman dragged her suffering bare feet over the rough stones of the market-place. On one side of her walked the executioner of the town; on the other, his assistant, with a lighted torch of tow, besmeared with resin and pitch, shedding around in a small cloud, the lurid smoke that was soon about to arise in a heavy volume from the pile.

As we have seen, there was little that was comforting in the life after death as conceived by the old pagan religions, while in medieval times the horrors of hell were painted in the most lurid colours, and were emphasized more than the joys of heaven. In a letter to Sura the younger Pliny gives us what may be taken as a prototype of all later haunted-house stories.