The Stratagem and Other Stories

VII As the putrefaction of the brain advanced, the burst- ing of the pustules occasionally overlapped, with the result that the confusion and exaggeration of madness with all its poignancy was superadded to the simpler hell. One might have thought that any confusion would have been a welcome relief to a lucidity so appalling; but this was not so. The torture was infused with a shat- tering sense of alarm. The images rose up threatening, disappeared only by blasting themselves into the pultaceous coprolite which was, as it were, the main body of the army which composed Arthur. Deeper and deeper as he dropped the phenomena grew constantly in every sense. Now they were a jungle in which the obscurity and terror of the whole gradually overshadowed even the abhorrence due to every part. The madness of the living is a thing so abominable and fearful as to chill every human heart with horror; it is less than nothing in comparison with the madness of the dead! A further complication now arose in the destruction irrevocable and complete of that compensating mecha- nism of the brain, which is the basis of the sense of time. Hideously distorted and deformed as it had been in the derangement of the brain, like a shapeless jelly shooting out, of a sudden, vast, unsuspected tentacles, the destruction of it cut a thousandfold deeper. The sense of consecution itself was destroyed; things se- quent appeared as things superposed or concurrent spa- tially; a new dimension unfolded; a new destruction of all limitation exposed a new and unfathomable abyss. To all the rest was added the bewilderment and fear which earthly agoraphobia faintly shadows forth; and at the same time the close immurement weighed upon him, since from infinitude there can be no escape. Add to this the hopelessness of the monotony of the