At last the streets were so narrow that the houses altogether joined. He found himself no longer on the stone pavements, but going through the crazy houses themselves. He passed along old wooden corridors that shook and crumbled beneath his tread, while below were black depths of rushing water--open sewers whose filth was alive with fearful reptiles; then along great galleries, and through rooms; door after door, yet no escape for the phantom-pursued wretch. And the rooms were of all characters, but all deserted and all terrible to the fancy. Now he was in a garret with noisome walls, with their dirty paper torn, waving in a cold wind, and hideous vermin crawling over it; now in a magnificent boudoir with sofas of purple pile and great mirrors, and a thousand nicknacks glittering with diamonds, a chamber heavy with voluptuous odours, fit nest for some loveliest, young Hetaira or Cleopatra's self, but always with some unspeakable loathsome thing in it; then into cellars, foul charnel-houses strewed with bones--bones of men that a voice within him told had been former victims of the horror, even as he should be--and so on and on and on before the nameless terror, fleeing from the unseen women that were ever noiselessly following. At last he felt a breath of fresh air on his cheek. O, God, was it escape at last? No! No! He was at the end of an alley, but it terminated on the foul mud of a river bank, a broad, dark river--no escape, and the crowd behind neared--neared--they had surrounded him--seized him.... * * * * * Once more the precious crystals calmed the overwrought brain for awhile. * * * * * The mouth of a pit--a pit of endless depths of suffocating darkness, and this darkness and the suffocating poisonous density of the air of it increased with the depth. A pit of indefinite breadth, it might be a hundred miles or a hundred yards or of no breadth at all, for it was in a realm beyond the limits of space. In the middle of the pit--that is at an equal distance from the edges, and on a level with them--the wretch was poised. He breathed labouriously--a difficult painful expiration, an agonising inspiration; and as he breathed out the air he sank--sank into the darkness of the pit--down into the suffocating darkness, into horror and death. Then he gasped for life; drank the difficult thick air and rose again to the surface; with each expiration sinking, with each inspiration rising to the lighter air of the surface. There was present to him all the agony of the drowning with a horror such as no death can give. But when he rose, he was not able to stay above the pit long; for he could not hold his breath--after a few minutes he was forced to breathe out--breathe out and sink down--down into that unutterable horror.