Chapter 25 - Page 2

the Erebus arches, desperate as the lost souls of the harlots,
who, every night, took the same plunge. Meantime, here and there, like
awaiting hearses, the coal-scows drifted along, poled broadside,
pell-mell to the current.

And as that tide in the water swept all craft on, so a like tide seemed
hurrying all men, all horses, all vehicles on the land. As ant-hills,
the bridge arches crawled with processions of carts, coaches, drays,
every sort of wheeled, rumbling thing, the noses of the horses behind
touching the backs of the vehicles in advance, all bespattered with ebon
mud--ebon mud that stuck like Jews' pitch. At times the mass, receiving
some mysterious impulse far in the rear, away among the coiled
thoroughfares out of sight, would, start forward with a spasmodic surge.
It seemed as if some squadron of centaurs, on the thither side of
Phlegethon, with charge on charge, was driving tormented humanity, with
all its chattels, across.

Whichever way the eye turned, no tree, no speck of any green thing was
seen--no more than in smithies. All laborers, of whatsoever sort, were
hued like the men in foundries. The black vistas of streets were as the
galleries in coal mines; the flagging, as flat tomb-stones, minus the
consecration of moss, and worn heavily down, by sorrowful tramping, as
the vitreous rocks in the cursed Gallipagos, over which the convict
tortoises crawl.

As in eclipses, the sun was hidden; the air darkened; the whole dull,
dismayed aspect of things, as if some neighboring volcano, belching its
premonitory smoke, were about to whelm the great town, as Herculaneum
and Pompeii, or the Cities of the Plain. And as they had been upturned
in terror towards the mountain, all faces were more or less snowed or
spotted with soot. Nor marble, nor flesh, nor the sad spirit of man, may
in this cindery City of Dis abide white.

As retired at length, midway, in a recess of the bridge, Israel surveyed
them, various individual aspects all but frighted him. Knowing not who
they were; never destined, it may be, to behold them again; one after
the other, they drifted by, uninvoked ghosts in Hades. Some of the
wayfarers wore a less serious look; some seemed hysterically merry; but
the mournful faces had an earnestness not seen in the others: because
man, "poor player," succeeds better in life's tragedy than comedy.

Arrived, in the end, on the Middlesex side, Israel's heart was
prophetically heavy; foreknowing, that being of this race, felicity
could never be his lot.

For five days he wandered and wandered. Without leaving statelier haunts
unvisited, he did not overlook those broader areas--hereditary parks and
manors of vice and misery. Not by constitution disposed to gloom,