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Sometimes for two, three, four minutes, the profound interest of what I read would fix my mind, and then I would peruse an entire column, or two, without consciousness of the meaning of one single word, my brain all drawn away to the innumerable host of the wan dead that camped about me, pierced with horror lest they should start, and stand, and accuse me: for the grave and the worm was the world; and in the air a sickening stirring of cerements and shrouds; and the taste of the pale and insubstantial grey of ghosts seemed to infect my throat, and faint odours of the loathsome tomb my nostrils, and the toll of deep-toned passing-bells my ears; finally the lamp smouldered very low, and my charnel fancy teemed with the screwing-down of coffins, lych-gates and sextons, and the grating of ropes that lower down the dead, and the first sound of the earth upon the lid of that strait and gloomy home of the mortal; that lethal look of cold dead fingers I seemed to see before me, the insipidness of dead tongues, the pout of the drowned, and the vapid froths that ridge their lips, till my flesh was moist as with the stale washing-waters of morgues and mortuaries, and with such sweats as corpses sweat, and the mawkish tear that lies on dead men's cheeks; for what is one poor insignificant man in his flesh against a whole world of the disembodied, he alone with them, and nowhere, nowhere another of his kind, to whom to appeal against them?
Every hour at least one new body is uncovered and borne on a rough stretcher to some one of the many morgues. The sight loses none of its sadness and pathos by its commonness; only the horror is gone, giving place to apathy and stupor. Stalwart men, in mud-stained, working clothes, bring up the body, the face covered with a cloth. The crowds part and gaze at the burned corpse as it passes.
She was tenderly borne through the lines by regimental headquarters to the church house morgue, while the sentinels stood aside with their bayonets and the corporal ordered "Halt!" Guards were placed at the Johnstown stations and all the morgues. Marched out of Camp.
Ronald Wyde, in spite of his many-sided experience of dissection-rooms, and morgues, and other ghastlinesses to which he had long since accustomed himself from principle, drew back at the sight perhaps because he had come to this strange place to clutch the world-old mystery of the life-essence, and found himself, instead, confronted on its threshold by the equal mystery of death.
The different graveyards are now so crowded that it will take several days to bury all the bodies that have been deposited in them. This was the day appointed by the Citizens' Committee for burying all the unidentified dead that have been laying in the different morgues since Sunday morning, and about three hundred bodies were taken to the cemeteries to-day.
And he did not present the bare skeletons of daring acts; those grand morgues, the journals, do that. There lie the dry bones of giant epics waiting Genius's hand to make them live.
Germany's taste in literature, once so natural and healthy, has become morbid, and Sudermann and Gorky and Oscar Wilde, and the rest of the unhealthy crew who swarm about the morgues, the dissecting-rooms, and the houses of assignation of life, the internuntiata libidinum, the leering conciliatrices of the dark streets, are her favorites now.
We'd better look up the morgue records." "Morgue!" The Runt grew excited instantly. "That place where you keep folks that get drowned or bumped off? Say, Captain, I'm here to tell you Clay was the livest man in Arizona, which is the same as sayin' anywheres. Cowpunchers don't take naturally to morgues. No, sir. Clay ain't in no morgue.
For if this trade wuz to stop for even one day out of the seven, why, where would be the crimes and casualities, the cuttin's up and actin's, the murders and the suicides, to fill up the Sunday papers with? And to keep the police courts full and a-runnin' over with business, and the prisons, and jails, and reformatorys full of victims, and the morgues full of dead bodies.
Thirteen was the original number and for the poor unfortunates who inhabited them it was most unlucky; the patients became worse, and on being taken from their subterranean homes in Mammoth Cave quickly died. Only two of the huts still remain. "Those curious mortals who are always seeking morgues and graveyard scenes should come here." What a place for contemplation!
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