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Updated: June 25, 2025
Masses of the population are allowed to live crowded together in unwholesome dens, half poisoned by the mephitic air of the neighbourhood. Then a fever breaks out, or a cholera, or a plague. Disease spreads from the miserable abodes of the poor into the comfortable homes of the rich, carrying death and devastation before it.
"I found your friend stretched on the ground, overpowered by the mephitic exhalation of the crater. I bore him to a purer atmosphere; and as I know the mountain well, I have conducted him safely to you. This is all our history.
There we have the human heart laid open before us without veil or disguise: there we see it in all its coarseness, its selfishness, its brutality. How many fine natures, cultivated, delicate, and generous, have gone forth from their native land, full of high resolves, only to perish in the mephitic atmosphere of a colony!
We then moved cautiously but rapidly forward, hand-in-hand, meeting with no difficulty or inconvenience during our passage, excepting such as arose from the mephitic atmosphere.
Already down there, amid slaughtered oxen and dead horses under a burning sun, a horrible pest-hole had been formed which sent its mephitic vapours over the countryside. Occasionally the sentries down the river saw amid the brown eddies of the rushing water the floating body of a Boer which had been washed away from the Golgotha above.
The plains of the Indus, the slopes of the Blue Mountains, the classic cities of Italy, the mephitic swamps of Eastern Africa, the Nilotic cataracts, Brazil, Abeokuta, Iceland, El Dorado all knew well him, his star-sapphire, and his congested church service: lands fertile, barren, savage, civilized, utilitarian, dithyrambic. He had worshipped at Mecca and at Salt Lake City.
Oh that I were in the poisonous desert, where I might gulp mephitic winds and drop dead; or in a moment be buried in tornados of burning sand! Would that my scull were grinning there, and blanching; rather than as it is consciously parching, scorched by fires itself has kindled! I spent all yesterday with that Irish scoundrel. Malignity is his element, and mischief his delight!
In 1750 ecclesiastical far-sightedness, court intrigue, and family ambitions, were actively preparing the way for the Austrian alliance in the mephitic air of Versailles. The issue at stake was the maintenance of the supremacy of the Church, and the ancient Christian organisation of France and of Europe. We now know how this long battle has gone.
Rudimental palms and pines of mushroom growth stood there motionless, sending forth no soft and soul-like murmurs into the lurid reek; for as yet leaves and flowers and blue skies and pure breezes were not, nothing but whiffs of mephitic and lethal vapor ascending, as from a vast charcoal brazier.
It is circular, half a mile wide, and very deep, surrounded by high banks, which in Virgil's time were covered with a gloomy forest. Mephitic vapors rise from its waters, so that no life is found on its banks, and no birds fly over it.
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