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And now, after his whirlwind harvest of evil knowledge, bitter disappointment, and fading passion, in the gathering mists of gray hopelessness, and the far worse mephitic air of indifference, he had come all of a sudden upon the ghastly discovery that, while overwhelmed with remorse for the vanished past, the present and the future had been calling him, but had now also that present and that future glided from him, and folded their wings of gloom in the land of shadows.
It was attacked immediately in The Daily Chronicle, a liberal paper usually distinguished for a certain leaning in favour of artists and men of letters, as a "tale spawned from the leprous literature of the French decadents a poisonous book, the atmosphere of which is heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction."
Hastening her footsteps after the horror of that encounter, she went by Ludgate Hill to the great cathedral, keeping carefully to the middle of the street, and glancing at the walls and shuttered casements on either side of her, recalling that appalling story which the Italian choir-mistress at the Ursulines had told her of the great plague in Milan how one morning the walls and doors of many houses in the city had been found smeared with some foul substance, in broad streaks of white and yellow, which was believed to be a poisonous compost carrying contagion to every creature who touched or went within the influence of its mephitic odour; how this thing had happened not once, but many times; until the Milanese believed that Satan himself was the prime mover in this horror, and that there were a company of wretches who had sold themselves to the devil, and were his servants and agents, spreading disease and death through the city.
The place where they had halted was wider, so as to form a cavern of moderate dimensions. Drops of water fell from the vault, but that did not prove that they oozed through the rock. They were simply the last traces left by the torrent which had so long thundered through this cavity, and the air there was pure though slightly damp, but producing no mephitic exhalation.
Ah! heh! but this land breeze-laden, perhaps, with the germs of the yellow-fever mephitic and all that you understand me, Dr Thompson?" "As much as you do yourself." "Thank you men of superior education sympathy and all that you understand me fully, major. Now this night-breeze coming through that half-open jalousie miasmata and all that.
Callot might have drawn it, Dante might have suggested it, but a minute attempt to describe its horrors would but disgust. There are depths in humanity which one cannot explore, as there are mephitic caverns into which one dare not penetrate. Old men, young men, and boys, stalwart burglars and highway robbers, slept side by side with wizened pickpockets or cunning-featured area-sneaks.
Shortly after we had fallen asleep, a party of Mexican travellers had arrived, and established themselves within a few hundred yards of us, but on a rising ground, where they avoided the mephitic vapours and the musquittoes which had so tortured Rowley and myself.
"Epictetus" means "bought" or "acquired," and is simply a servile designation. He was born at Hierapolis, in Phrygia, a town between the rivers Lycus and Meander, and considered by some to be the capital of the province. The town possessed several natural wonders sacred springs, stalactite grottoes, and a deep cavern remarkable for its mephitic exhalations.
He held it as far into the darkness as he could, and the red light showed that a ladder, built of heavy beams of teak, ran downwards from the edge of the hole. Mr. Haydon sniffed cautiously. "The air doesn't smell bad," he remarked; "close and musty, but no mephitic vapours. I think we'll go down."
It was no rush of air, sending life tingling in the blood made brilliant with carmine of oxidation, but the dense, mephitic sough of the thick wool of water. He descended and sat upon the floor to think. Feasible methods had failed, and the sands of his life were running out like the old physician's. Now to try the impracticable.
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