grave-soil

Updated: May 16, 2025

These showed in their faces and disordered array that dismay and anxiety which were natural to them at sight of their king so strangely and appallingly stricken, but evidently they were entirely and happily unconscious of the THING that sat there in their midst, touching them, consorting its charnel horrors with their warm-blooded humanity, so near, so close to them, that he fancied the smell of that trickling gore, that dank grave-soil, must necessarily enter in at their nostrils, and he sickened at the thought for very sympathy.

Various - The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 05, No. 32, June, 1860