End of the world -- Fiction; Epidemics -- Fiction; Science fiction; Twenty-first century -- Fiction
It is impossible to conjecture the strange enchainment of events which
restored the lifeless form of my friend to our hands. In that part of
the town where the fire had most raged the night before, and which now
lay quenched, black and cold, the dying dog of Raymond crouched beside
the mutilated form of its lord. At such a time sorrow has no voice;
affliction, tamed by its very vehemence, is mute. The poor animal
recognised me, licked my hand, crept close to its lord, and died. He
had been evidently thrown from his horse by some falling ruin, which
had crushed his head, and defaced his whole person. I bent over the
body, and took in my hand the edge of his cloak, less altered in
appearance than the human frame it clothed. I pressed it to my lips,
while the rough soldiers gathered around, mourning over this worthiest
prey of death, as if regret and endless lamentation could re-illumine
the extinguished spark, or call to its shattered prison-house of flesh
the liberated spirit. Yesterday those limbs were worth an universe;
they then enshrined a transcendant power, whose intents, words, and
actions were worthy to be recorded in letters of gold; now the
superstition of affection alone could give value to the shattered
mechanism, which, incapable and clod-like, no more resembled Raymond,
than the fallen rain is like the former mansion of cloud in which it
climbed the highest skies, and gilded by the sun, attracted all eyes,
and satiated the sense by its excess of beauty.
Such as he had now become, such as was his terrene vesture, defaced and
spoiled, we wrapt it in our cloaks, and lifting the burthen in our
arms, bore it from this city of the dead. The question arose as to
where we should deposit him. In our road to the palace, we passed
through the Greek cemetery; here on a tablet of black marble I caused
him to be laid; the cypresses waved high above, their death-like gloom
accorded with his state of nothingness. We cut branches of the funereal
trees and placed them over him, and on these again his sword. I left a
guard to protect this treasure of dust; and ordered perpetual torches
to be burned around.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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