The Land of Darkness: Along with Some Further Chapters in the Experiences of the Little PilgrimOliphant, Mrs. (Margaret)
General
The Land of Darkness: Along with Some Further Chapters in the Experiences of the Little Pilgrim
Oliphant, Mrs. (Margaret)
Future life -- Fiction; Purgatory -- Fiction
on and on; and ever that maze of movement, till the eyes were feverish
and the mouth parched; ever that mist of faces, now one gleaming out of
the chaos, now another, some like the faces of angels, some miserable,
weary, strained with smiling, with the monotony, and the endless,
aimless, never-changing round. I heard myself calling to them to be
still--to be still! to pause a moment. I felt myself stumble and turn
round in the giddiness and horror of that movement without repose. And
finally, I fell under the feet of the crowd, and felt the whirl go over
and over me, and beat upon my brain, until I was pushed and thrust out
of the way lest I should stop the measure. There I lay, sick, satiate,
for I know not how long; loathing everything around me, ready to give
all I had (but what had I to give?) for one moment of silence. But
always the music went on, and the dancers danced, and the people
feasted, and the songs and the voices echoed up to the skies.
How at last I stumbled forth I cannot tell. Desperation must have moved
me, and that impatience which, after every hope and disappointment,
comes back and back, the one sensation that never fails. I dragged
myself at last by intervals, like a sick dog, outside the revels, still
hearing them, which was torture to me, even when at last I got beyond
the crowd. It was something to lie still upon the ground, though without
power to move, and sick beyond all thought, loathing myself and all that
I had been and seen. For I had not even the sense that I had been
wronged to keep me up, but only a nausea and horror of movement, a
giddiness and whirl of every sense. I lay like a log upon the ground.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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