Feb. 21, 2026

Edgar Allan Poe Horror Stories: The Black Cat, The Cask of Amontillado, and More Classic Gothic Tales

Edgar Allan Poe Horror Stories: The Black Cat, The Cask of Amontillado, and More Classic Gothic Tales
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Classic Edgar Allan Poe horror stories—gothic terror, madness, murder, and psychological dread—all in one chilling anthology. If you love classic horror, dark literature, and Victorian-era nightmares, this Poe compilation is built for you: guilt that won’t stay buried, revenge sealed behind bricks, obsession that rots the mind, and survival-horror fear sharpened to a razor’s edge.

Inside this episode:

• The Black Cat — a confession soaked in alcohol-fueled violence, guilt, and the uncanny feeling that something is watching from the dark.
• Morella — grief, identity, and a haunting that crawls into the heart of a family and refuses to let go.
• The Cask of Amontillado — Poe’s coldest revenge tale: a smiling invitation, a wine cellar, and a final brick laid in silence.
• The Pit and the Pendulum — pure claustrophobic survival horror: imprisonment, panic, and the merciless countdown of the pendulum’s arc.
• Berenice — obsession turns grotesque as love, memory, and fixation spiral into something unspeakable.

Whether you’re here for classic ghost stories, murder confessions, or psychological horror that still hits hard today—press play, turn the lights down, and let Poe do what he does best.

🎧 LISTEN NOW and subscribe for spine-tingling horror stories every week!

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🎵 Music by Ray Mattis 👉 Check out Ray’s incredible work here !
👨‍💼 Executive Producers: Rob Fields, Bobbletopia.com
🎥 Produced by: Daniel Wilder
🌐 Explore more terrifying tales at: WeeklySpooky.com
WEBVTT

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Hello, my spookies. Happy to see you back tonight. I

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want to share a sampling of some of my favorite

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Edgar Allan Poe stories. After all, his work is what

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originally set me on a path of seeking all things

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fearful and fun. So kick back and relax. Whether you've

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never heard these stories or you just want to trip

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down memory lane, I have you covered. We'll start with

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the classic The Black Cat and let the madness grow

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from there. Get cozy. It's about to get dark. I

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think I even see a few storm clouds forming on

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the horizon. The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe. For

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the most wild yet homely narrative which I am about

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to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief, mad Indeed,

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I would be to expect it in a case where

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my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad Am,

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I not, and very surely do I not dream. But

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tomorrow I die, and today I would unburthen my soul.

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My immediate purpose is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly,

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and without comment, a series of mere household events. In

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their consequences. These events have terrified, have tortured, have destroyed me.

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Yet I will not attempt to expound them to me.

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They have presented little but horror to many. They will

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seem less terrible than Baroques. Hereafter, perhaps some intellect may

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be found which will reduce my phanfasm to the commonplace,

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some intellect more calm, more logical, and far less excitable

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than my own, which will perceive, in the circumstances I

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detail with awe nothing more than an ordinary succession of

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very natural causes and effects. From my infancy, I was

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noted for the docility and humanity of my disposition. My

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tenderness of heart was even so conspicuous as to make

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me the jest of my companions. I was especially fond

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of animals, and was indulged by my parents with a

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great variety of pets. With these I spent most of

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my time, and never was so happy as when feeding

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and caressing them. This peculiarity of character grew with my growth,

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and in my manhood. I derived from it one of

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my principal sources of pleasure. To those who have cherished

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an affection for a faithful and sagacious dog, I need

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hardly be at the trouble of explaining the nature or

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the intensity of the great gratification thus derivable. There is

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something in the unselfish and self sacrificing love of a

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brute which goes directly to the heart of him who

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has had frequent occasion to test the poultry friendship and

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gossamer fidelity of mere man. I married early, and was

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happy to find my wife a disposition not uncongenial with

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my own. Observing my partiality for domestic pets, she lost

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no opportunity of procuring those of the most agreeable kind.

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We had birds, goldfish, a fine dog, rabbits, a small monkey,

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and a cat. This latter was a remarkably large and

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beautiful animal, entirely black, and sagacious to an astonishing degree.

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In speaking of his intelligence, my wife, who at heart

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was not a little tinctured by superstition, made frequent allusion

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to the ancient popular notion which regarded all black cats

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as witches in disguise. Not that she was everius upon

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this point, And I mentioned the matter at all for

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no better reason than that it happens just now to

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be remembered. Pluto, this was the cat's name, was my

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favorite pet and playmate. I alone fed him, and he

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attended me wherever I went about the house. It was

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even with difficulty that I could prevent him from following

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me through the streets. Our friendship lasted in this manner

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for several years, during which my general temperament and character,

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through the instrumentality of the fiend in temperance, had I

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blushed to confess this experienced a radical alteration. For the worse.

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I grew day by day more moody, more irritable, more

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regardless of the feelings of others. I suffered myself to

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use intemperance language to my wife. At length, I even

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offered her personal violence. My pets, of course, were made

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to feel the change in my disposition. I not only

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neglected but ill used them. For Pluto, however, I still

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retained sufficient regard to restrain me from maltreating him, as

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I made no scruple of the maltreating the rabbits, the monkey,

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or even the dog, when by accident or through affection,

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they came in my way. But my disease grew upon me.

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For what disease is like alcohol, and at length even Pluto,

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who was now becoming old and consequently somewhat peevish, Even

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Pluto began to experience the effects of my ill temper.

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One night, returning home, much intoxicated from one of my

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haunts about town, I fancied that the cat avoided my presence.

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I seized him, when, in his fright at my violence,

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he inflicted a slight wound upon my hand with his teeth.

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The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew

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myself no longer. My original soul seemed at once to

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take its flight from my body, and more than fiendish

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malevolence gin nurtured, thrilled every fiber of my frame. I

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took from my waistcoat pocket a pen knife. Opened it,

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grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut

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one of its eyes from the socket. I blush, I burn,

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I shudder while I penned the damnable atrocity. When reason

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returned with the morning, when I had slept off the

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fumes of the Knight's debauch, I experienced a sentiment half

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of horror, half of remorse for the crime of which

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I had been guilty. But it was at best a

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feeble and equivocal feeling, and the soul remained untouched. I

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again plunged into excess, and soon drowned in wine all

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memory of the deed. In the meantime, the cat slowly

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recovered the socket of the lost eye presented. It is

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true of frightful appearance, but he no longer appeared to

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suffer any pain. He went about the house as usual,

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but as might be expected, fled in extreme terror at

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my approach. I had so much of my old heart

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left as to be at first grieved by this evident

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dislike on the part of a creature which had once

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so loved me. But this feeling soon gave place to irritation,

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and then came, as if to my final and irrevocable

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overthrow the spirit of perverseness. Of this spirit, philosophy takes

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no account. Yet I am not more sure that my

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soul lives than I am that perverseness is one of

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the primitive impulses of the human heart, one of the

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indivisible primary faculties or sentiments, which give direction to the

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character of man, who is not a hundred times found

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himself committing a vile or a silly action for no

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other reason than because he knows he should not have.

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We not perpetual inclination in the teeth of our best judgment,

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to violate that which is law merely because we understand

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it to be such. This spirit of perverseness, I say,

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came to my final overthrow. It was this unfathomable longing

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of the soul to vex itself, to offer violence to

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its own nature, to do wrong for wrong's sake, only

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that urged me to continue, and finally to consummate the

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injury I had afflicted upon the unoffending brute. One morning

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in cool blood, I slipped a noose about its neck

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and hung it to the limb of a tree. Hung

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it with the tears streaming from my eyes and with

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the bitterest remorse at my heart. Hung it because I

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knew that it had loved me, and because I felt

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it had given me no reason of offense. Hung it

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because I knew that in doing so, I was committing

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a sin, a deadly sin that would so jeopardize my

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immortal soul as to place it if such a thing

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were possible, even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy

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of the most merciful and most terrible God. On the

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night of the day on which this cruel deed was done,

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I was aroused from sleep by the cry of fire.

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The curtains of my bed were in flames. The whole

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house was blazing. It was with great difficulty that my wife,

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a servant, and myself made our escape from the conflagration.

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The destruction was complete. My entire worldly wealth was swallowed up,

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and I resigned myself thenceforth to despair. I am above

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the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause

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and effect between the disaster and the atrocity. But I

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am detailing a chain of facts, and wish not to

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leave even a possible link imperfect. On the day succeeding

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the fire, I visited the room. The walls, with one exception,

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had fallen in. This exception was found in a compartment

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wall not very thick, which stood about the middle of

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the house, and against which had rested the head of

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my bed. The plastering had here in great measure resisted

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the action of the fire, a fact which I attributed

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to its having been recently spread about this wall. A

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dense crowd were collected, and many persons seemed to be

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examining a particular portion of it with very minute and

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eager attention. The words strange, singular, and other similar expressions

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excited my curiosity. I approached and saw, as if graven

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in bas relief, upon the white surface, the figure of

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a gigantic cat. The impression was given with in accuracy,

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truly marvelous. There was a rope about the animal's neck.

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When I first beheld this apparition, For I could scarcely

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regard ard it is less. My wonder and my terror

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were extreme. But at length reflection came to my aid.

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The cat I remembered had been hung in a garden

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adjacent to the house. Upon the alarm of fire, This

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garden had been immediately filled by the crowd, by someone

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of whom the animal must have been cut from the

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tree and thrown through an open window into my chamber.

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This had probably been done with the view of arousing

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me from sleep. The falling of the other walls had

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compressed the victim of my cruelty into the substance of

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freshly spread plaster, the lime of which, with the fumes

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and the ammonia from the carcass, had been accomplished the

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portraiture as I saw it, Although I thus readily accounted

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to my reason, if not altogether to my conscience, for

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the startling fact just detailed, it did not the less

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fail to make a deep impression upon my fancy. For

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months I could not rid myself of the phantasm of

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the cat, and during this period there came back into

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my spirit a half sentiment that seemed but was not remorse.

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I went so far as to regret the loss of

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the animal, and to look about me among the vile

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haunts which I now habitually frequented for another pet of

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the same species and of somewhat similar appearance with which

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to supply its place. One night, as I sat half

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stupefied in a den of more than infamy, my attention

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was suddenly drawn to some black object reposing upon the

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head of one of the immense hogsheads of gin or

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of rum, which constituted the chief furniture of the apartment.

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I had been looking steadily at the top of this

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hogshead for some minutes, and what now caused me surprise

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was the fact that I had not sooner perceived the object.

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Thereupon I approached it and touched it with my hand.

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It was a black cat, a very large one, fully

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as large as Pluto, and closely resembling him in every

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aspect but one Pluto had not a white hair upon

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any portion of his body. But this cat had a large,

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although indefinite, splotch of white covering nearly the whole region

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of the breast. Upon my touching him, he immediately arose, purred, loudly,

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rubbed against my hand, and appeared delighted with my notice. This, then,

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was the very creature of which I was in search.

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I at once offered to purchase it of the landlord,

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but this person made no claim to it, knew nothing

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of it, had never seen it before. I continued my caresses,

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and when I prepared to go home, the animal evinced

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a disposition to accompany me. I permitted it to do so,

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occasionally stooping and patting it as I proceeded. When it

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reached the house, it domesticated itself at once and became

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immediately a great favorite with my wife. For my own part,

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I soon found a dislike to it arising within me.

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This was just the reverse of what I had anticipated,

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But I know not how or why it was its

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evident fondness for myself rather disgusted and annoyed. By slow degrees,

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these feelings of disgust and annoyance rose into the bitterness

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of hatred. I avoided the creature, a certain sense of shame,

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and the remembrance of my former deed of cruelty preventing

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me from physically abusing it. I did not for some

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weeks strike or otherwise violently ill use it. But gradually,

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very gradually, I came to look upon it with unutterable loathing,

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and to flee silently from its odious presence, as if

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from the breath of a pestilence. What added no doubt

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to my hatred of the beast was the discovery, on

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the morning after I brought it home, that, like Pluto,

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it also had been deprived of one of its eyes.

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This circumstance, however, only endeared it to my wife, who,

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as I have already said, possessed in a high degree

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that humanity of feeling which had once been my distinguishing

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trait and the source of many of my simplest and

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purest pleasures. With my aversion to this cat, however, its

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partiality for myself seemed to increase. It followed my footsteps

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with a pertinacity which it would be difficult to make

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the reader comprehend. Whenever I sat, it would crouch beneath

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my chair, or spring upon my knees, covering me with

231
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its loathsome caresses. If I arose to walk, it would

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get between my feet and thus nearly throw me down,

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or fastening its long sharp claws in my dress, clamber

234
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in this manner to my breast. At such times, although

235
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I longed to destroy it with a blow, I was

236
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yet withheld from doing so, partly by a memory of

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my former crime. But chiefly, let me confess it at once,

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by absolute dread of the beast. This dread was not

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exactly a dread of physical evil, and yet I should

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be at a loss how otherwise to define it. I

241
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am almost ashamed to own. Yes, even in this felon cell,

242
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I am almost ashamed to own that the terror and

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horror with which the animal inspired me had been heightened

244
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by one of the merest chimeras it would be possible

245
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to conceive. My wife had called my attention more than

246
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once to the character of the mark of white hair

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of which I have spoken, and which constituted the sole

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visible difference between the strange beast and the one I

249
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had destroyed. The reader will remember at this mark, although large,

250
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had been originally very indefinite, but by slow degrees degrees

251
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nearly imperceptible, and which for a long time my reason

252
00:17:11.640 --> 00:17:16.839
struggled to reject as fanciful, it had at length assumed

253
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a rigorous distinctness of outline. It was now the representation

254
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of an object that I shuddered to name, And for

255
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this above all I loathed and dreaded, and would have

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rid myself of the monster had I dared. It was now,

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I say, the image of a hideous, of a ghastly

258
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thing of the gallows, oh mournful and terrible engine of

259
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horror and of crime, of agony, and of death. And

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now was I indeed wretched beyond the wretchedness of mere humanity,

261
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and a brute beast whose fellow I had contemptuously destroyed,

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A brute beast to work out for me, for me,

263
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a man fashioned in the image of the High God,

264
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so much of insufferable woe, alas neither by day nor

265
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by night knew I the blessing of rest anymore. During

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the former, the creature left me no moment alone, And

267
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in the latter I started hourly from dreams of utterable fear,

268
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to find the hot breath of the thing upon my face,

269
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and its vast weight, an incarnate nightmare that I had

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no power to shake off, incumbent eternally upon my heart.

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Beneath the pressure of torments such as these, the feeble

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remnant of the good within me succumbed. Evil thoughts became

273
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my soul, intimates the darkest and most evil of thoughts.

274
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The moodiness of my usual temper increased to hatred of

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all things and of all mankind, while from the sudden,

276
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frequent and ungovernable outbursts of a fury to which I

277
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now blindly abandoned myself. My uncomplaining wife, alas was the

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most usual and the most patient of sufferers. One day

279
00:19:08.960 --> 00:19:12.880
she accompanied me, upon some household erin into the cellar

280
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of the old building which our property compelled us to inhabit.

281
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The cat followed me down the steep stairs, and nearly

282
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throwing me headlong, exasperated me to madness. Uplifting an axe

283
00:19:24.759 --> 00:19:28.000
and forgetting in my wrath the childish dread which had

284
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hitherto stayed my hand, I aimed a blow at the animal,

285
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which of course would have proved instantly fatal had it

286
00:19:35.000 --> 00:19:38.880
descended as I wished. But this blow was arrested by

287
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the hand of my wife. Goaded by the interference into

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a rage more than demoniacal, I withdrew my arm from

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00:19:45.279 --> 00:19:49.000
her grasp and buried the axe in her brain. She

290
00:19:49.160 --> 00:19:53.799
fell dead upon the spot without a groan. This hideous

291
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murder accomplished. I set myself forthwith and with entire deliberation,

292
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to the task of concealing the box. I knew that

293
00:20:01.160 --> 00:20:03.759
I could not remove it from the house, either by

294
00:20:03.839 --> 00:20:06.720
day or by night, without the risk of being observed

295
00:20:06.759 --> 00:20:11.319
by the neighbors. Many projects entered my mind. At one period,

296
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I thought of cutting the corpse into minute fragments and

297
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destroying them by fire. At another I resolved to dig

298
00:20:19.240 --> 00:20:22.720
a grave for it in the floor of the cellar. Again,

299
00:20:23.000 --> 00:20:26.279
I deliberated about casting it into the well in the yard,

300
00:20:26.799 --> 00:20:30.200
about packing it into a box as if merchandized with

301
00:20:30.279 --> 00:20:33.279
the usual arrangements, and so getting a porter to take

302
00:20:33.319 --> 00:20:36.599
it from my house. Finally, I hit upon what I

303
00:20:36.640 --> 00:20:41.559
considered a far better expedient than either of these. I

304
00:20:41.640 --> 00:20:44.519
determined to wall it up in the cellar, as the

305
00:20:44.599 --> 00:20:47.079
monks of the Middle Ages are recorded to have walled

306
00:20:47.160 --> 00:20:50.279
up their victims for a purpose such as this. The

307
00:20:50.319 --> 00:20:54.079
cellar was well adapted. Its walls were loosely constructed and

308
00:20:54.119 --> 00:20:57.960
had lately been plastered throughout with a rough plaster, which

309
00:20:58.200 --> 00:21:02.119
the dampness of the atmosphere had prevented from hardening. Moreover,

310
00:21:02.319 --> 00:21:04.720
in one of the walls was a projection caused by

311
00:21:04.799 --> 00:21:08.160
a false chimney or fireplace that had been filled up

312
00:21:08.319 --> 00:21:11.000
and made to resemble the rest of the cellar. I

313
00:21:11.119 --> 00:21:13.799
made no doubt that I could readily displace the bricks

314
00:21:13.839 --> 00:21:16.920
at this point, insert the corpse, and wall the whole

315
00:21:17.079 --> 00:21:22.319
up as before, so that no eye could detect anything suspicious.

316
00:21:23.440 --> 00:21:27.200
And in this calculation I was not deceived by means

317
00:21:27.240 --> 00:21:31.119
of a crowbar. I easily dislodged the bricks, and having

318
00:21:31.200 --> 00:21:34.839
carefully deposited the body against the inner wall, I propped

319
00:21:34.839 --> 00:21:38.680
it in that position, while with little trouble, I relayed

320
00:21:38.720 --> 00:21:43.000
the whole structure as it originally stood, having procured mortar,

321
00:21:43.160 --> 00:21:47.279
sand and hair with every possible precaution, I prepared a

322
00:21:47.279 --> 00:21:50.599
plaster which could not be distinguished from the old, and

323
00:21:50.640 --> 00:21:54.240
with this I very carefully went over the new brickwork.

324
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When I had finished, I felt satisfied that all was right.

325
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The wall did not present the slightest appearance of having

326
00:22:02.119 --> 00:22:05.079
been disturbed. The rubbish on the floor was picked up

327
00:22:05.119 --> 00:22:08.559
with the minutest of care. I looked around triumphantly and

328
00:22:08.599 --> 00:22:12.640
said to myself, here, at least, then my labor has

329
00:22:12.720 --> 00:22:16.200
not been in vain. My next step was to look

330
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for the beast which had been the cause of so

331
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much wretchedness, For I had at length firmly resolved to

332
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put it to death. Had I been able to meet

333
00:22:25.400 --> 00:22:27.960
with it at the moment, there could have been no

334
00:22:28.079 --> 00:22:30.799
doubt of its fate. But it appeared that the crafty

335
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animal had been alarmed at the violence of my previous anger,

336
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and forbore to present itself in my present mood. It

337
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is impossible to describe or to imagine the deep, the

338
00:22:41.839 --> 00:22:45.400
blissful sense of relief which the absence of that detested

339
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creature occasioned in my bosom. It did not make its

340
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appearance during the night, and thus for one night at

341
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least since its introduction into the house, I soundly and

342
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tranquility slept. I slept, even with the burden of murder

343
00:23:01.240 --> 00:23:05.359
upon my soul. The second and third day passed, and

344
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still my tormentor came not once again. I breathed as

345
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a free man. The monster in terror had fled the

346
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premises forever I should behold it no more. My happiness

347
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was supreme. The guilt of my dark deed disturbed me

348
00:23:21.319 --> 00:23:24.559
but little. Some few inquiries had been made, but these

349
00:23:24.599 --> 00:23:27.599
had been readily answered. Even a search had been instituted,

350
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but of course nothing was to be discovered. I looked

351
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upon my future felicity as secured. Upon the fourth day

352
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of the assassination, a party of police came very unexpectedly

353
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into the house and proceeded again to make a rigorous

354
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investigation of the premises secure. However, in the inscrutability of

355
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my place of concealment, I felt no embarrassment whatsoever. The

356
00:23:50.880 --> 00:23:54.519
officers bade me accompany them in their search. They left

357
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no nook or corner unexplored. At length, for the third

358
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or fourth time they descended into the cellar, I quivered

359
00:24:02.799 --> 00:24:05.680
not in a muscle. My heart beat calmly, as that

360
00:24:05.720 --> 00:24:09.920
of one whose slumbers in innocence. I walked the cellar

361
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from end to end. I folded my arms upon my bosom,

362
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and roamed easily to and fro. The police were thoroughly

363
00:24:17.240 --> 00:24:20.559
satisfied and prepared to depart. The glee at my heart

364
00:24:20.720 --> 00:24:24.440
was too strong to be restrained. I burned to say

365
00:24:24.680 --> 00:24:27.720
if but one word by way of triumph, and to

366
00:24:27.839 --> 00:24:33.400
render doubly sure their assurance of my guiltlessness. Gentlemen, I

367
00:24:33.480 --> 00:24:36.400
said at last, as the party ascended the steps, I

368
00:24:36.480 --> 00:24:39.400
delight to have allayed your suspicions. I wish you all

369
00:24:39.519 --> 00:24:43.000
health and a little more courtesy. By the bye, gentlemen,

370
00:24:43.359 --> 00:24:46.640
this this is a very well constructed house. In the

371
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rabid desire to say something easily, I scarcely knew what

372
00:24:49.720 --> 00:24:53.519
I uttered at all, I may say, an excellently well

373
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constructed house. These walls are you going, gentlemen, These walls

374
00:24:57.960 --> 00:25:02.200
are solidly put together. And here, through the mere frenzy

375
00:25:02.240 --> 00:25:05.880
of Bravado, I rapped heavily with a cane, which I

376
00:25:05.960 --> 00:25:09.559
held in my hand, upon that very portion of the brickwork,

377
00:25:09.680 --> 00:25:13.160
behind which stood the corpse of the wife of my bosom.

378
00:25:13.960 --> 00:25:16.559
But may God shield and deliver me from the fangs

379
00:25:16.599 --> 00:25:19.519
of the arch fiend. No sooner had the reverberation of

380
00:25:19.559 --> 00:25:22.920
my blows sunk into silence than I was answered by

381
00:25:22.920 --> 00:25:26.400
a voice from within the tomb, by a cry, at

382
00:25:26.440 --> 00:25:29.799
first muffled and broken like the sobbing of a child,

383
00:25:30.000 --> 00:25:35.160
and then quickly swelling into one, long, loud and continuous scream,

384
00:25:35.960 --> 00:25:41.519
utterly anomalous and inhuman, a howl, a wailing shriek, half

385
00:25:41.519 --> 00:25:44.480
of horror and half of triumph, such as might have

386
00:25:44.480 --> 00:25:47.599
arisen only out of hell, conjointly from the throats of

387
00:25:47.640 --> 00:25:50.480
the damned, in their agony, of the demons that exult

388
00:25:50.519 --> 00:25:54.480
in the damnation of my own thoughts. It is folly

389
00:25:54.559 --> 00:25:58.079
to speak swooning. I staggered to the opposite wall. For

390
00:25:58.119 --> 00:26:01.279
one instant the party upon the stairs were meaned motionless

391
00:26:01.720 --> 00:26:05.359
through extremity of terror and of awe. In the next

392
00:26:05.559 --> 00:26:08.799
a dozen stout arms were toiling at the wall. It

393
00:26:08.880 --> 00:26:13.400
felt bodily. The corpse, already greatly decayed and clotted with gore,

394
00:26:13.480 --> 00:26:17.400
stood erect before the eyes of the spectators. Upon its head,

395
00:26:17.880 --> 00:26:21.480
upon its head, with red extended mouth and a solitary

396
00:26:21.519 --> 00:26:25.519
eye of fire, sat the hideous beast, whose craft had

397
00:26:25.559 --> 00:26:29.599
seduced me into murder, and whose informing voice had consigned

398
00:26:29.640 --> 00:26:33.200
me to the hangman. I had walled the monster up

399
00:26:33.880 --> 00:26:48.079
within the tomb. Morella a Tail by Edgar Allan Poe

400
00:26:48.279 --> 00:26:54.039
read by Enrique Couto, with a feeling of deep but

401
00:26:54.200 --> 00:26:59.960
most singular affection. I regarded my friend Morella, thrown by

402
00:27:00.119 --> 00:27:05.279
accident into her society many years ago. My soul from

403
00:27:05.319 --> 00:27:09.559
our first meeting burned with fires it had never before known.

404
00:27:10.720 --> 00:27:14.119
But the fires were not of eros and bitter and

405
00:27:14.200 --> 00:27:17.759
Tormenting to my spirit was the gradual conviction that I

406
00:27:17.799 --> 00:27:22.160
could in no manner define their unusual meaning or regulate

407
00:27:22.240 --> 00:27:28.160
their vague intensity. Yet we met, and fate bound us

408
00:27:28.160 --> 00:27:31.200
together at the altar, and I never spoke of love

409
00:27:31.319 --> 00:27:37.119
or thought of passion. She, however, shunned society, and attaching

410
00:27:37.160 --> 00:27:42.559
herself to me alone rendered me happy. It is a

411
00:27:42.640 --> 00:27:48.720
happiness to wonder, it is a happiness to dream. Marilla's

412
00:27:48.799 --> 00:27:53.119
erudition was profound, as I hoped to live. Her talents

413
00:27:53.119 --> 00:27:57.680
were of no common order. Her powers of mind were gigantic.

414
00:27:58.319 --> 00:28:01.680
I felt this, and in many matters became her pupil.

415
00:28:02.519 --> 00:28:07.160
I soon, however, found that Marilla, perhaps on account of

416
00:28:07.200 --> 00:28:11.119
her Presbourg education, laid before me a number of those

417
00:28:11.240 --> 00:28:15.400
mystical writings which are usually considered the mere dross of

418
00:28:15.440 --> 00:28:20.119
the early German literature. These, for what reasons I could

419
00:28:20.200 --> 00:28:25.839
not imagine, were her favorite and constant study. And that

420
00:28:26.000 --> 00:28:29.799
in process of time they became my own, should be

421
00:28:29.839 --> 00:28:35.079
attributed to the simple but effectual influence of habit and example.

422
00:28:36.960 --> 00:28:40.720
In all this, if I err not, my reason had

423
00:28:40.799 --> 00:28:45.720
little to do. My convictions, or I forget myself, were

424
00:28:45.759 --> 00:28:49.880
in no manner acted upon by the imagination, Nor was

425
00:28:49.920 --> 00:28:53.200
any tincture of the mysticism which I read to be

426
00:28:53.319 --> 00:28:57.480
discovered unless I am greatly mistaken, either in my deeds

427
00:28:57.559 --> 00:29:01.200
or in my thoughts. Feeling deeply persuaded of this, I

428
00:29:01.279 --> 00:29:04.880
abandoned myself more implicitly to the guidance of my wife,

429
00:29:05.359 --> 00:29:08.720
and entered with a bolder spirit into the intricacies of

430
00:29:08.799 --> 00:29:14.839
her studies. And then, then, when poring over forbidden pages,

431
00:29:15.039 --> 00:29:19.559
I felt the spirit kindle within me. Would Marilla place

432
00:29:19.640 --> 00:29:23.079
her cold hand upon my own, and rake up from

433
00:29:23.160 --> 00:29:27.079
the ashes of a dead philosophy, some low singular words

434
00:29:27.440 --> 00:29:33.079
whose strange meaning burnt themselves in upon my memory. And then,

435
00:29:33.319 --> 00:29:36.519
hour after hour would I linger by her side and

436
00:29:36.680 --> 00:29:40.400
dwell upon the music of her thrilling voice, until at

437
00:29:40.480 --> 00:29:43.640
length its melody was tinged with terror and fell like

438
00:29:43.680 --> 00:29:47.079
a shadow upon my soul. And I grew pale and

439
00:29:47.200 --> 00:29:52.720
shuddered inwardly at those two unearthly tones, and thus joy

440
00:29:52.880 --> 00:29:57.519
suddenly faded into horror, and the most beautiful became the

441
00:29:57.559 --> 00:30:04.559
most hideous, as Hinnen became Guihenna. It is unnecessary to

442
00:30:04.640 --> 00:30:09.480
state the exact character of these disquisitions, which, growing out

443
00:30:09.519 --> 00:30:12.720
of the volumes I have mentioned, formed for so long

444
00:30:12.759 --> 00:30:17.519
a time almost the sole conversation of Morella and myself.

445
00:30:19.000 --> 00:30:22.640
By the learned in what might be termed theological morality,

446
00:30:23.039 --> 00:30:26.960
they will be readily conceived, and by the unlearned they would,

447
00:30:27.039 --> 00:30:32.079
at all events be little understood. The wild pantheism of Fiji,

448
00:30:32.960 --> 00:30:38.160
the modified palangenesia of the Pythagorans, and above all the

449
00:30:38.240 --> 00:30:43.160
doctrines of identity as urged by Shelling, were generally the

450
00:30:43.240 --> 00:30:46.920
points of discussion, presenting the most of beauty to the

451
00:30:47.000 --> 00:30:53.039
imaginative Morella. That identity which is not improperly called personal,

452
00:30:53.599 --> 00:30:56.880
I think, mister Locke, truly defines to consist in the

453
00:30:56.960 --> 00:31:00.799
sameness of a rational being. And since by person we

454
00:31:01.000 --> 00:31:05.400
understand an intelligent essence having reason, and since there is

455
00:31:05.440 --> 00:31:09.839
a consciousness which always accompanies thinking, it is this which

456
00:31:09.880 --> 00:31:13.319
makes us all to be that which we call ourselves,

457
00:31:13.960 --> 00:31:19.039
thereby distinguishing us from other beings that think and giving

458
00:31:19.160 --> 00:31:25.000
us our personal identity. But the principal individuanis the notion

459
00:31:25.160 --> 00:31:29.039
that identity, which at death is or is not lost forever,

460
00:31:29.920 --> 00:31:34.759
was to me at all times a consideration of intense interest,

461
00:31:35.480 --> 00:31:38.519
not more from the mystical and exciting nature of its

462
00:31:38.559 --> 00:31:42.880
consequences than from the marked and agitated manner in which

463
00:31:42.960 --> 00:31:48.559
Marilla mentioned them. But indeed the time had now arrived

464
00:31:48.799 --> 00:31:51.680
when the mystery of my wife's manner oppressed me as

465
00:31:51.720 --> 00:31:54.920
a spell. I could no longer bear the touch of

466
00:31:54.960 --> 00:31:59.720
her wan fingers, nor the low tone of her musical language,

467
00:32:00.279 --> 00:32:05.160
nor the luster of her melancholy eyes. And she knew

468
00:32:05.200 --> 00:32:09.400
all this, but did not upbraid. She seemed conscious of

469
00:32:09.480 --> 00:32:14.720
my weakness or my folly, and smiling called it fate.

470
00:32:15.759 --> 00:32:19.720
She seemed also conscious of a cause to me unknown

471
00:32:20.319 --> 00:32:24.240
for the gradual alienation of my regard, but she gave

472
00:32:24.319 --> 00:32:28.240
me no hint or token of its nature. Yet was

473
00:32:28.279 --> 00:32:33.519
she woman, and pined away daily. In time, the crimson

474
00:32:33.599 --> 00:32:37.599
spot settled steadily upon the cheek, and the blue veins

475
00:32:37.680 --> 00:32:42.720
upon the pale forehead became prominent, and one instant my

476
00:32:42.920 --> 00:32:47.480
nature melted into pity. But in the next I met

477
00:32:47.519 --> 00:32:50.759
the glance of her meaning eyes, and then my soul

478
00:32:51.000 --> 00:32:54.319
sickened and became giddy, with the giddiness of one who

479
00:32:54.400 --> 00:33:00.400
gazes downward into some dreary and fathomless abyss. Shall I

480
00:33:00.480 --> 00:33:03.519
then say that I longed with an earnest and consuming

481
00:33:03.599 --> 00:33:10.319
desire for the moment of Marilla's decease. I did, But

482
00:33:10.440 --> 00:33:13.799
the fragile spirit clung to its tenement of clay for

483
00:33:13.920 --> 00:33:18.119
many days, for many weeks, and irksome months, until my

484
00:33:18.279 --> 00:33:22.039
tortured nerves obtained the mastery over my mind, and I

485
00:33:22.119 --> 00:33:26.279
grew furious through delay, and with the heart of a fiend,

486
00:33:26.720 --> 00:33:30.359
cursed the days and the hours, and the bitter moments,

487
00:33:30.480 --> 00:33:34.079
which seemed to lengthen and lengthen, as her gentle life

488
00:33:34.119 --> 00:33:39.480
declined like shadows in the dying of the day. But

489
00:33:39.680 --> 00:33:43.920
one autumnal evening, when the winds lay still in heaven,

490
00:33:44.400 --> 00:33:48.000
Marilla called me to her side. There was a dim

491
00:33:48.039 --> 00:33:51.680
mist over all the earth, and a warm glow upon

492
00:33:51.759 --> 00:33:55.759
the waters, and amid the rich october leaves of the forest,

493
00:33:56.039 --> 00:34:01.680
a rainbow from the firmament had surely fallen. As I came,

494
00:34:02.359 --> 00:34:06.640
she was murmuring in a low undertone which trembl'd with

495
00:34:06.799 --> 00:34:13.360
fervor the words of a Catholic hymn. Santa Maria, turn

496
00:34:13.480 --> 00:34:18.320
thine eyes upon the sinner's sacrifice of fervent prayer and

497
00:34:18.440 --> 00:34:23.639
humble love from thy holy throne above at morn, at noon,

498
00:34:23.719 --> 00:34:28.679
at twilight, Dim Maria, thou hast heard my hymn in

499
00:34:28.880 --> 00:34:32.239
joy and woe, in good and ill, Mother of God,

500
00:34:32.360 --> 00:34:35.880
be with me still, when my hours flew gently by,

501
00:34:36.079 --> 00:34:39.119
and no storms were in the sky, my soul, lest

502
00:34:39.159 --> 00:34:43.360
it should truant be Thy love did guide to thine

503
00:34:43.440 --> 00:34:47.800
and thee. Now when clouds of fate o'ercast all my

504
00:34:47.960 --> 00:34:51.960
present and my past, let my future radiant shine with

505
00:34:52.119 --> 00:35:01.360
sweet hopes of THEE and thine. It is a day

506
00:35:01.440 --> 00:35:08.599
of days, said Marella, a day of all days, either

507
00:35:08.719 --> 00:35:12.320
to live or die. It is a fair day for

508
00:35:12.400 --> 00:35:16.880
the suns of earth and life. Ah more fair for

509
00:35:16.960 --> 00:35:22.360
the daughters of heaven and death. I turned towards her,

510
00:35:23.199 --> 00:35:28.960
and she continued, I am dying, yet shall I live?

511
00:35:30.000 --> 00:35:34.880
Therefore for me, Marella, thy wife, hath the Charnel house

512
00:35:35.079 --> 00:35:41.159
no terrors mark me, not even the terrors of the worm.

513
00:35:41.440 --> 00:35:44.280
The days have never been when thou couldst love me

514
00:35:45.599 --> 00:35:50.760
but her whom in life thou didst abhor. In death,

515
00:35:51.400 --> 00:35:57.760
thou shalt adore Morella. I repeat that I am dying,

516
00:35:58.079 --> 00:36:01.679
but within me is a pledge of that affair. Ah,

517
00:36:01.719 --> 00:36:05.440
how little which you felt for me, Marella. And when

518
00:36:05.519 --> 00:36:09.199
my spirit departs, shall the child live, Thy child and

519
00:36:09.360 --> 00:36:14.119
mine Morella's. But thy days shall be days of sorrow,

520
00:36:14.840 --> 00:36:18.400
that sorrow which is the most lasting of impressions, as

521
00:36:18.440 --> 00:36:21.719
the cypress is the most enduring of trees. For the

522
00:36:21.840 --> 00:36:25.440
hours of thy happiness are over, and joy is not

523
00:36:25.679 --> 00:36:29.239
gathered twice in a life, as the roses of pestum

524
00:36:29.360 --> 00:36:33.000
twice in a year. Thou shalt not then play the

525
00:36:33.119 --> 00:36:36.880
ten with time. But being ignorant of the myrtle and

526
00:36:36.920 --> 00:36:40.599
the vine, thou shalt bear about with thee thy shroud

527
00:36:40.679 --> 00:36:47.440
on earth like the muslamin at Mecca Morella, I cried, Marella,

528
00:36:47.480 --> 00:36:52.159
how knowest thou this? But she turned away, her face

529
00:36:52.320 --> 00:36:57.719
upon the pillow, and a slight tremor coming over her limbs.

530
00:36:59.480 --> 00:37:06.320
She thus died, and I heard her voice no more yet,

531
00:37:07.039 --> 00:37:11.159
as she had foretold her child, to which in dying

532
00:37:11.280 --> 00:37:14.440
she had given birth, and which breathed not till the

533
00:37:14.519 --> 00:37:20.679
mother breathed no more. Her child, a daughter, lived, and

534
00:37:20.800 --> 00:37:24.880
she grew strangely in size and intellect, and was the

535
00:37:24.920 --> 00:37:29.199
perfect resemblance of her who had departed. And I loved

536
00:37:29.239 --> 00:37:32.599
her with a love more fervent and more intense than

537
00:37:32.639 --> 00:37:37.400
I believed it possible to feel on earth. But ere

538
00:37:37.519 --> 00:37:41.360
long the heaven of this pure affection became overcast, and

539
00:37:41.480 --> 00:37:46.000
gloom and horror and grief came over it in clouds.

540
00:37:46.840 --> 00:37:50.719
I said. The child grew strangely in stature and intelligence.

541
00:37:51.360 --> 00:37:56.159
Strange indeed was her rapid increase in bodily size. But

542
00:37:56.360 --> 00:38:00.760
terrible O terrible were the tumultuous thoughts which upon me

543
00:38:01.039 --> 00:38:05.000
while watching the development of her mental being. Could it

544
00:38:05.039 --> 00:38:08.880
be otherwise? When I daily discovered in the conceptions of

545
00:38:08.920 --> 00:38:12.280
the child the adult powers and faculties of the woman,

546
00:38:13.119 --> 00:38:16.840
when the lessons of experience fell from the lips of infancy,

547
00:38:17.679 --> 00:38:20.559
and when the wisdom or the passions of maturity I

548
00:38:20.679 --> 00:38:26.039
found hourly gleaming from its full and speculative eye. When

549
00:38:26.360 --> 00:38:29.840
I say all this became evident to my appalled senses,

550
00:38:30.079 --> 00:38:32.480
when I could no longer hide it from my soul,

551
00:38:32.760 --> 00:38:36.760
nor throw it off from those perceptions which trembled to receive.

552
00:38:36.800 --> 00:38:42.840
It is it to be wondered at that suspicions of

553
00:38:42.880 --> 00:38:46.559
a nature fearful and exciting crept in upon my spirit,

554
00:38:47.360 --> 00:38:50.760
or that my thoughts fell back, aghast, upon the wild

555
00:38:50.880 --> 00:38:56.760
tales and thrilling theories of the entombed. Marilla I snatched

556
00:38:56.760 --> 00:39:00.119
from the scrutiny of the world, a being whom destiny

557
00:39:00.159 --> 00:39:03.719
compelled me to adore. And in the rigid seclusion of

558
00:39:03.760 --> 00:39:08.199
my ancestral home, I watched with an agonizing anxiety over

559
00:39:08.320 --> 00:39:13.960
all which concerned my daughter. And as the years rolled away,

560
00:39:14.599 --> 00:39:18.599
and daily I gazed upon her eloquent and mild and

561
00:39:18.760 --> 00:39:23.079
holy face, and pored over her maturing form, did I

562
00:39:23.159 --> 00:39:27.559
discover new points of resemblance in the child to her mother,

563
00:39:28.920 --> 00:39:35.360
the melancholy and the dead, And hourly grew darker, these shadows,

564
00:39:35.960 --> 00:39:41.559
as it were, of similitude, and became more full, and

565
00:39:41.679 --> 00:39:45.840
more definite, and more perplexing, and to me more terrible

566
00:39:45.840 --> 00:39:49.519
in their aspect. For that her smile was like her mother's,

567
00:39:49.559 --> 00:39:52.679
I could bear, but then I shuddered at its too

568
00:39:52.840 --> 00:39:57.039
perfect identity. That her eyes were like Marilla's own, I

569
00:39:57.079 --> 00:40:01.440
could endure, But then they looked down too often into

570
00:40:01.480 --> 00:40:06.400
the depths of my soul with Marilla's intense and bewildering meaning,

571
00:40:07.000 --> 00:40:09.960
And in the contour of the high forehead, and in

572
00:40:10.079 --> 00:40:12.960
the ringlets of the silken hair, and in the wan

573
00:40:13.159 --> 00:40:17.119
fingers which buried themselves therein, and in the musical tones

574
00:40:17.159 --> 00:40:20.800
of her speech, and above all, oh above all, in

575
00:40:20.880 --> 00:40:24.000
the phrases and expressions of the dead, on the lips

576
00:40:24.039 --> 00:40:27.760
of the loved and the living, I found food for

577
00:40:27.880 --> 00:40:34.679
consuming thought, and horror for a worm that would not die.

578
00:40:35.039 --> 00:40:38.679
Thus passed away two lustrooms of her life. Yet my

579
00:40:38.800 --> 00:40:43.320
daughter remained nameless upon the earth. My child and my

580
00:40:43.519 --> 00:40:48.039
love were the designations usually prompted by a father's affection,

581
00:40:48.440 --> 00:40:52.400
and the rigid seclusion of her days precluded all other intercourse.

582
00:40:53.159 --> 00:40:56.800
Marella's name died with her at her death. Of the mother,

583
00:40:56.920 --> 00:41:00.639
I had never spoken to the daughter. It was impossible

584
00:41:00.679 --> 00:41:04.519
to speak. Indeed, during the brief period of her existence,

585
00:41:04.719 --> 00:41:08.280
the latter had received no impressions from the outward world,

586
00:41:08.400 --> 00:41:11.199
but such as might have been afforded by the narrow

587
00:41:11.280 --> 00:41:15.599
limits of her privacy. But at length, the ceremony of

588
00:41:15.639 --> 00:41:19.920
baptism presented to my mind, in its unnerved and agitated condition,

589
00:41:20.320 --> 00:41:25.840
a present deliverance from the horrors of my destiny. And

590
00:41:25.920 --> 00:41:29.760
at the baptismal font I hesitated for a name, and

591
00:41:29.880 --> 00:41:33.320
many titles of the wise and beautiful of antique in

592
00:41:33.400 --> 00:41:37.599
modern times of my own and foreign lands came thronging

593
00:41:37.679 --> 00:41:43.119
to my lips, and many many fair titles of the gentle,

594
00:41:43.400 --> 00:41:47.599
and the happy and the good. What prompted me then

595
00:41:47.719 --> 00:41:52.280
to disturb the memory of the buried dead? What daemon

596
00:41:52.719 --> 00:41:55.800
urged me to breathe that sound, which, in its very

597
00:41:55.880 --> 00:41:59.559
recollection was wont to make ebb and flow the purple

598
00:41:59.639 --> 00:42:03.760
blood in tides from the temples to the heart? What

599
00:42:04.000 --> 00:42:07.559
fiend spoke from the recesses of my soul when amid

600
00:42:07.599 --> 00:42:10.599
those dim aisles, and in the silence of the night,

601
00:42:10.800 --> 00:42:13.199
I shrieked within the ears of the Holy Man. The

602
00:42:13.280 --> 00:42:22.760
syllables Marilla, what more than a fiend, convulsed the features

603
00:42:22.760 --> 00:42:26.079
of my child and overspread them with the hues of death.

604
00:42:26.559 --> 00:42:30.440
As starting at that sound, she turned her glassy eyes

605
00:42:30.880 --> 00:42:35.480
from the earth to heaven, and, falling prostrate upon the

606
00:42:35.480 --> 00:42:46.679
black slabs of our ancestral vault, responded, I am here distinct, coldly, calmly, distinct,

607
00:42:47.119 --> 00:42:51.679
like a knell of death. Horrible horrible death sank the

608
00:42:51.760 --> 00:42:56.920
eternal sounds within my soul. Years years may roll away,

609
00:42:56.960 --> 00:43:02.000
but the memory of that epoch never now. Was I

610
00:43:02.119 --> 00:43:05.400
indeed ignorant of the flowers and the vine. But the

611
00:43:05.440 --> 00:43:10.199
hemlock and the cypress overshadowed me night and day, and

612
00:43:10.280 --> 00:43:13.920
I kept no reckoning of time or place. And the

613
00:43:13.960 --> 00:43:19.159
stars of my fate faded from heaven, and therefore my

614
00:43:19.320 --> 00:43:23.159
spirit grew dark, and the figures of the earth passed

615
00:43:23.159 --> 00:43:28.280
by me like flitting shadows, and among them all I

616
00:43:28.400 --> 00:43:36.719
beheld only Morella. The winds of the firmament breathed but

617
00:43:36.920 --> 00:43:40.320
one sound within my ears, and the ripples upon the

618
00:43:40.400 --> 00:43:49.119
sea murmured evermore Morella. But she died, and with my

619
00:43:49.239 --> 00:43:53.639
own hands I bore her to the tomb. And I

620
00:43:53.719 --> 00:43:57.320
laughed with a long and bitter laugh, as I found

621
00:43:57.360 --> 00:44:00.519
no traces of the first in the charnel where I

622
00:44:00.639 --> 00:44:41.159
laid the second Morella. The Cask of Amontiado by Edgar

623
00:44:41.800 --> 00:44:49.440
Allan Poe. The thousands of injuries of Fortunado had borne

624
00:44:49.519 --> 00:44:54.400
as I best could, But when he ventured upon insult,

625
00:44:55.159 --> 00:44:59.840
I vowed revenge. You who so well know the nature

626
00:44:59.840 --> 00:45:03.159
of my soul will not suppose, however, that I gave

627
00:45:03.320 --> 00:45:07.719
utterance to a threat at length I would be avenged.

628
00:45:08.360 --> 00:45:14.079
This was a point definitively settled, but the very definitiveness

629
00:45:14.400 --> 00:45:18.400
with which it was resolved precluded the idea of risk.

630
00:45:19.599 --> 00:45:24.320
I must not only punish, but punish with impunity. A

631
00:45:24.400 --> 00:45:29.400
wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is

632
00:45:29.480 --> 00:45:33.760
equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt

633
00:45:33.800 --> 00:45:39.480
as such to him who has done the wrong. It

634
00:45:39.559 --> 00:45:42.840
must be understood that neither by word nor deed had

635
00:45:42.880 --> 00:45:48.440
I given Fortunato cause to doubt my good will. I continued,

636
00:45:49.039 --> 00:45:52.800
as was my wont to smile in his face, and

637
00:45:52.880 --> 00:45:56.400
he did not perceive that my smile now was at

638
00:45:56.440 --> 00:46:02.159
the thought of his immolation. He had a weak point,

639
00:46:02.639 --> 00:46:06.559
this Fortunado, Although in other regards he was a man

640
00:46:06.679 --> 00:46:10.760
to be respected and even feared, he prided himself on

641
00:46:10.840 --> 00:46:15.119
his connoisseur ship in wine. Few Italians have the true

642
00:46:15.199 --> 00:46:20.199
virtuoso spirit. For the most part, their enthusiasm is adopted

643
00:46:20.239 --> 00:46:24.599
to suit the time and opportunity to practice imposture upon

644
00:46:24.679 --> 00:46:30.920
the British and Austrian millionaires. In painting and gemmery. Fortunado,

645
00:46:31.440 --> 00:46:35.280
like his countrymen, was a quack, but in the matter

646
00:46:35.400 --> 00:46:40.159
of old wines he was sincere. In this respect I

647
00:46:40.239 --> 00:46:44.079
did not differ from him materially. I was skillful in

648
00:46:44.119 --> 00:46:48.840
the Italian vintages myself, and bought largely whenever I could.

649
00:46:50.400 --> 00:46:53.960
It was about dusk one evening, during the supreme madness

650
00:46:53.960 --> 00:46:59.480
of the carnival season, that I encountered my friend. He

651
00:46:59.719 --> 00:47:04.039
costs me with excessive warmth, for he had been drinking much.

652
00:47:05.199 --> 00:47:08.960
The man wore motley, he had on tight fitting party

653
00:47:09.000 --> 00:47:12.519
striped dress, and his head was surmounted by the conical

654
00:47:12.599 --> 00:47:16.719
cap and bells. I was so pleased to see him

655
00:47:17.119 --> 00:47:20.159
that I thought I should never have done wringing his hand.

656
00:47:21.280 --> 00:47:26.159
I said to him, my dear Fortunado, you are luckily met,

657
00:47:26.800 --> 00:47:30.360
how remarkably well you are looking today. But I have

658
00:47:30.480 --> 00:47:34.199
received a pipe of what passes for a montiado, and

659
00:47:34.280 --> 00:47:40.039
I have my doubts, how said he, A montiado a

660
00:47:40.079 --> 00:47:44.679
pipe impossible, and in the middle of the carnival, I

661
00:47:44.760 --> 00:47:48.440
have my doubts, I replied, And I was silly enough

662
00:47:48.480 --> 00:47:51.880
to pay the full a montiado price without consulting you.

663
00:47:52.039 --> 00:47:54.679
In the matter. You were not to be found, and

664
00:47:54.719 --> 00:47:59.320
I was fearful of losing a bargain. A Montiado. I

665
00:47:59.360 --> 00:48:03.920
have my doubt, a Montiado, and I must satisfy them,

666
00:48:04.800 --> 00:48:08.920
A Montiado, as you are engaged, I am on my

667
00:48:09.000 --> 00:48:12.719
way to Luchesi. If any one has a critical turn,

668
00:48:12.800 --> 00:48:16.920
it is he, he will tell me, Luceesi cannot tell

669
00:48:17.039 --> 00:48:21.559
a mantiado from sherry. Yet some fools will have it

670
00:48:21.639 --> 00:48:25.760
that his taste is a match for yours. Come, let's

671
00:48:25.760 --> 00:48:31.360
go whither to your vaults, my friend. No, I will

672
00:48:31.400 --> 00:48:34.719
not impose upon your good nature. I perceive you have

673
00:48:34.760 --> 00:48:40.679
an engagement. Luceesi, I have no engagement. Come, my friend. No,

674
00:48:41.440 --> 00:48:44.280
it is not the engagement but the severe cold with

675
00:48:44.320 --> 00:48:48.599
which I perceive you are afflicted. The vaults are insufferably damp,

676
00:48:48.760 --> 00:48:53.039
they are encrusted with niter. Let us go. Nevertheless, the

677
00:48:53.119 --> 00:48:57.800
cold is merely nothing. A Montiado, you have been imposed upon.

678
00:48:58.119 --> 00:49:03.360
And as for Luchesi, he cannot distinguish sherry from a mantiado.

679
00:49:04.840 --> 00:49:09.159
Thus speaking, Fortunado possessed himself of my arm, putting on

680
00:49:09.280 --> 00:49:13.719
a mask of black silk, drawing a roculaure slee upon

681
00:49:13.800 --> 00:49:18.519
my person. I suffered him to hurry me to my palazzo.

682
00:49:19.159 --> 00:49:22.920
There were no attendants at home. They had absconded to

683
00:49:22.920 --> 00:49:26.039
make Mary an honor of the time. I had told

684
00:49:26.079 --> 00:49:28.599
them that I should not return until the morning, and

685
00:49:28.639 --> 00:49:32.000
had given them explicit orders not to stir from the house.

686
00:49:32.719 --> 00:49:36.440
These orders were sufficient, I well knew, to insure their

687
00:49:36.480 --> 00:49:41.320
immediate disappearance one and all. As soon as my back

688
00:49:41.480 --> 00:49:46.159
was turned, I took from their sconces to Flambeaux, and,

689
00:49:46.239 --> 00:49:50.239
giving one to Fortunado, bowed him through several suites of

690
00:49:50.320 --> 00:49:54.719
rooms to the archway that led into the vaults. I

691
00:49:54.840 --> 00:49:59.000
passed down a long and winding staircase, requesting him to

692
00:49:59.039 --> 00:50:03.039
be cautious as he followed. We came at length to

693
00:50:03.119 --> 00:50:05.800
the foot of the descent, and stood together on the

694
00:50:05.880 --> 00:50:11.039
damp ground of the catacombs Montressor's. The gait of my

695
00:50:11.199 --> 00:50:14.760
friend was unsteady, and the bells upon his cap jingled

696
00:50:14.800 --> 00:50:20.079
as he strode the pipe, said he. It is farther on,

697
00:50:20.559 --> 00:50:24.400
said I, but observe the white web work which gleams

698
00:50:24.440 --> 00:50:28.920
from these cavern walls. He turned towards me and looked

699
00:50:28.960 --> 00:50:32.679
into my eyes with two filmy orbs that distilled the

700
00:50:32.800 --> 00:50:39.719
room of intoxication. Niter, he asked. At length, Niter I replied,

701
00:50:40.480 --> 00:50:49.800
how long have you had that cough? My poor friend

702
00:50:49.840 --> 00:50:54.960
found it impossible to reply for many minutes. It is nothing,

703
00:50:55.360 --> 00:51:00.599
he said. At last, come, I said, with decision, go back.

704
00:51:00.639 --> 00:51:04.599
Your health is precious. You are rich, respected, admired, beloved.

705
00:51:05.000 --> 00:51:07.719
You are happy as once I was. You are a

706
00:51:07.760 --> 00:51:10.679
man to be missed for me. It is no matter.

707
00:51:11.199 --> 00:51:13.599
We will go back. You will be ill, and I

708
00:51:13.639 --> 00:51:19.599
cannot be responsible. Besides, there is Luceesi enough, he said.

709
00:51:20.039 --> 00:51:22.639
The cough is a mere nothing. It will not kill me.

710
00:51:22.920 --> 00:51:28.239
I shall not die of a cough. True, true, I replied,

711
00:51:28.559 --> 00:51:32.000
And indeed I had no intention of alarming you unnecessarily,

712
00:51:32.679 --> 00:51:36.239
but you should use all proper caution. A draft of

713
00:51:36.280 --> 00:51:40.320
this medic will defend us from the damps. Ere. I

714
00:51:40.400 --> 00:51:42.719
knocked off the neck of a bottle, which I drew

715
00:51:42.800 --> 00:51:45.960
from a long row of its fellows that lay upon

716
00:51:46.000 --> 00:51:51.199
the mold drink, I said, presenting him the wine. He

717
00:51:51.280 --> 00:51:54.559
raised it to his lips with a leer. He paused

718
00:51:54.599 --> 00:52:00.440
and nodded to me familiarly, while his bells jingled. I drink,

719
00:52:00.679 --> 00:52:05.400
he said, The buried that repose around us, and I

720
00:52:05.800 --> 00:52:10.119
to your long life. He again took my arm, and

721
00:52:10.199 --> 00:52:18.119
we proceeded. These vaults, he said, are extensive. The Montressors,

722
00:52:18.360 --> 00:52:22.639
I replied, were a great and numerous family. I forget

723
00:52:22.679 --> 00:52:28.199
your arms. A huge human foot door field azure. The

724
00:52:28.199 --> 00:52:32.000
foot crushes a serpent rampant whose fangs are embedded in

725
00:52:32.079 --> 00:52:38.960
the heel, and the motto emo me impune lasette good,

726
00:52:39.360 --> 00:52:42.960
he said. The wine sparkled in his eyes, and the

727
00:52:43.000 --> 00:52:47.079
bells jingled. My own fancy grew warm with the medock.

728
00:52:48.400 --> 00:52:51.199
We had passed through the walls of piled bones, with

729
00:52:51.360 --> 00:52:56.960
casks and puncheons intermingling, to the inmost recesses of the catacombs.

730
00:52:57.639 --> 00:53:00.559
I paused again, and this time I may made bold

731
00:53:00.679 --> 00:53:04.880
to seize Fortunado by an arm above the elbow. The niter,

732
00:53:05.320 --> 00:53:10.280
I said, see it increases. It hangs like moss upon

733
00:53:10.320 --> 00:53:14.960
the vaults. We are below the river's bed. The drops

734
00:53:14.960 --> 00:53:18.760
of moisture trickle among the bones. Come we will go

735
00:53:18.880 --> 00:53:22.639
back ere. It is too late, your cough, it is nothing,

736
00:53:23.000 --> 00:53:26.719
he said. Let us go on. But first another draft

737
00:53:26.760 --> 00:53:30.159
of the medic I broke and reached him, a flescent

738
00:53:30.360 --> 00:53:34.039
of de grave. He emptied it at a breath. His

739
00:53:34.159 --> 00:53:38.360
eyes flashed with a fierce light. He laughed and threw

740
00:53:38.400 --> 00:53:41.840
the bottle upwards with a gesticulation. I did not understand,

741
00:53:42.719 --> 00:53:46.559
I looked at him in surprise. He repeated the movement,

742
00:53:47.679 --> 00:53:54.360
a grotesque one. You do not comprehend, he said not I,

743
00:53:54.360 --> 00:53:59.800
I replied, Then you are not of the brotherhood. How

744
00:54:00.840 --> 00:54:05.039
you are not of the Masons. Yes, yes, I said, yes, yes,

745
00:54:05.800 --> 00:54:11.639
you impossible a Mason? A Mason, I replied, a sign,

746
00:54:12.159 --> 00:54:16.239
He said, it is this, I answered, producing a trowel

747
00:54:16.280 --> 00:54:21.440
from beneath the folds of my lair. You jest, he exclaimed,

748
00:54:21.480 --> 00:54:26.639
recoiling a few paces. Let us proceed to the Amontiado.

749
00:54:27.960 --> 00:54:32.039
Be it, so, I said, replacing the tool beneath the cloak,

750
00:54:32.280 --> 00:54:36.679
and again offering him my arm. He leaned upon it heavily.

751
00:54:37.239 --> 00:54:41.280
We continued our route in search of the Amontiado. We

752
00:54:41.360 --> 00:54:45.000
passed through a range of low arches, descended, passed on,

753
00:54:45.320 --> 00:54:49.199
and descending again. Arrived at a deep crypt, in which

754
00:54:49.239 --> 00:54:52.360
the foulness of the air caused our flambeaux rather to

755
00:54:52.440 --> 00:54:56.559
glow than flame. At the most remote end of the

756
00:54:56.599 --> 00:55:01.079
crypt there appeared another, less spacious its walls had been

757
00:55:01.159 --> 00:55:05.719
lined with human remains piled to the vault overhead, in

758
00:55:05.800 --> 00:55:10.480
the fashion of the Great Catacombs of Paris. Three sides

759
00:55:10.519 --> 00:55:13.760
of this interior crypt were still ornamented in this manner.

760
00:55:14.719 --> 00:55:17.800
From the fourth the bones had been thrown down and

761
00:55:17.920 --> 00:55:21.719
lay promiscuously upon the earth, forming at one point a

762
00:55:21.840 --> 00:55:26.000
mound of some size. Within the wall. Thus exposed by

763
00:55:26.000 --> 00:55:29.880
the displacing of the bones, we perceived a still interior

764
00:55:29.960 --> 00:55:35.360
recess in depth about four feet width three in height

765
00:55:35.559 --> 00:55:39.119
six or seven seemed to have been constructed for no

766
00:55:39.320 --> 00:55:43.880
especial use within itself, but formed merely the interval between

767
00:55:43.960 --> 00:55:47.519
two of the colossal supports of the roof of the catacombs,

768
00:55:48.039 --> 00:55:51.719
and was backed by one of their circumscribing walls of

769
00:55:51.880 --> 00:55:56.320
solid granite. It was in vain that Fortnado, uplifting his

770
00:55:56.480 --> 00:56:00.039
dull torch, endeavored to pry into the depths of the

771
00:56:00.079 --> 00:56:05.079
recess its termination. The feeble light did not enable us

772
00:56:05.079 --> 00:56:11.079
to see proceed. I said, herein is the Amontiado, as

773
00:56:11.079 --> 00:56:15.360
for Luceesi, he is an Ignoramus, interrupted my friend, as

774
00:56:15.360 --> 00:56:19.079
he stepped unsteadily forward, while I followed immediately at his

775
00:56:19.119 --> 00:56:22.599
heels in an instant. He had reached the extremity of

776
00:56:22.639 --> 00:56:26.480
the niche, and, finding his progress arrested by the rock,

777
00:56:26.960 --> 00:56:31.039
stood stupidly bewildered. A moment more, and I had fettered

778
00:56:31.119 --> 00:56:35.880
him to the granite. In its surface were two iron staples,

779
00:56:36.639 --> 00:56:40.400
and from each other, about two feet horizontally. From one

780
00:56:40.440 --> 00:56:44.679
of these depended a short chain, from the other a padlock.

781
00:56:45.639 --> 00:56:48.519
Throwing the lynx about his waist. It was but the

782
00:56:48.599 --> 00:56:52.079
work of a few seconds to secure it. He was

783
00:56:52.119 --> 00:56:56.239
too much astounded to resist. Withdrawing the key, I stepped

784
00:56:56.320 --> 00:57:01.079
back from the recess. Pass your hand, I said, over

785
00:57:01.119 --> 00:57:05.119
the wall. You cannot help feeling the nier. Indeed, it

786
00:57:05.239 --> 00:57:09.559
is very damp. Once more, let me implore you to return. No,

787
00:57:10.719 --> 00:57:14.719
then I will positively leave. You. Must first render you

788
00:57:14.840 --> 00:57:21.639
all little attentions in my power. The Amontiado ejaculated my friend,

789
00:57:21.840 --> 00:57:29.360
not yet recovered from his astonishment. True, I replied the Amontiado.

790
00:57:29.519 --> 00:57:32.480
As I said these words, I busied myself among the

791
00:57:32.559 --> 00:57:36.920
pile of bones of which I have before spoken, throwing

792
00:57:36.920 --> 00:57:40.880
them aside. I soon uncovered a quantity of building stone

793
00:57:40.920 --> 00:57:45.280
and mortar. With these materials, and with the aid of

794
00:57:45.360 --> 00:57:49.639
my trowel. I began vigorously to wall up the entrance

795
00:57:49.679 --> 00:57:53.440
of the niche. I had scarcely laid the first tear

796
00:57:53.519 --> 00:57:57.000
of my masonry when I discovered that the intoxication of

797
00:57:57.039 --> 00:58:02.760
Fortunado had in great measure worn off. The earliest indication

798
00:58:02.960 --> 00:58:06.159
I had of this was a low, moaning cry from

799
00:58:06.159 --> 00:58:10.400
the depth of the recess. It was not the cry

800
00:58:11.039 --> 00:58:14.880
of a drunken man. There was then a long and

801
00:58:15.000 --> 00:58:20.000
obstinate silence. I laid the second tier, and the third,

802
00:58:20.519 --> 00:58:24.039
and the fourth, and then I heard the furious vibrations

803
00:58:24.119 --> 00:58:28.119
of the chain. The noise lasted for several minutes, during

804
00:58:28.159 --> 00:58:32.159
which that I might hearken to it with the more satisfaction,

805
00:58:32.760 --> 00:58:35.840
I ceased my labors and sat down upon the bones.

806
00:58:36.920 --> 00:58:40.639
When at last the clanking subsided, I resumed the trowel

807
00:58:41.119 --> 00:58:45.239
and finished without interruption the fifth, the sixth, and the

808
00:58:45.280 --> 00:58:49.119
seventh tier. The wall was now nearly upon a level

809
00:58:49.159 --> 00:58:53.000
with my breast. I again paused, and, holding the flambeaux

810
00:58:53.000 --> 00:58:56.440
over the mason work, threw a few feeble rays upon

811
00:58:56.599 --> 00:59:01.000
the figure. Within a succession of loud and shrill screams,

812
00:59:01.079 --> 00:59:04.320
bursting suddenly from the throat of the chained form seemed

813
00:59:04.360 --> 00:59:08.800
to thrust me violently back. For a brief moment, I hesitated,

814
00:59:08.840 --> 00:59:13.239
I trembled, sheathing my rapier, I began to grope with

815
00:59:13.320 --> 00:59:17.360
it about the recess. The thought of an instant reassured me.

816
00:59:17.880 --> 00:59:21.159
I placed my hand upon the solid fabric of the catacombs,

817
00:59:21.800 --> 00:59:26.559
and felt satisfied. I reapproached the wall. I replied to

818
00:59:26.559 --> 00:59:30.519
the yells of him who clamored. I re echoed, I aided.

819
00:59:30.599 --> 00:59:33.880
I surpassed them in volume and in strength. I did this,

820
00:59:34.559 --> 00:59:39.440
and the clamorer grew still. It was now midnight, and

821
00:59:39.519 --> 00:59:43.159
my task was drawing to a close. I had completed

822
00:59:43.159 --> 00:59:47.159
the eighth, the ninth, and the tenth tier. I had

823
00:59:47.159 --> 00:59:50.639
finished a portion of the last, and the eleventh. There

824
00:59:50.679 --> 00:59:54.559
remained but a single stone to be fitted and plastered in.

825
00:59:55.280 --> 00:59:58.440
I struggled with its weight. I placed it partially in

826
00:59:58.519 --> 01:00:02.679
its destined position. But now there came from out of

827
01:00:02.679 --> 01:00:06.800
the niche a low laugh that erected the hairs upon

828
01:00:06.880 --> 01:00:11.920
my head. It was succeeded by a sad voice, which

829
01:00:11.960 --> 01:00:15.599
I had difficulty in recognizing as that of the noble Fortunado.

830
01:00:16.679 --> 01:00:21.199
The voice said, ha ha ha he he he, A

831
01:00:21.360 --> 01:00:25.159
very good joke, indeed an excellent jest. We will have

832
01:00:25.599 --> 01:00:28.960
many a rich laugh about it at the palazzo. He

833
01:00:28.960 --> 01:00:38.639
he he over our wine, he he. The Amontiado, I said, yes,

834
01:00:38.719 --> 01:00:42.280
the amontiado. But is it not getting late? Will they

835
01:00:42.320 --> 01:00:46.280
not be awaiting us at the palazzo eighty Fortunato and

836
01:00:46.360 --> 01:00:52.280
the rest. Let us be gone? Yes, I said, Let

837
01:00:52.400 --> 01:00:58.000
us be gone for the love of God montresor yes,

838
01:00:58.880 --> 01:01:03.639
I said, for the love of God. But to these

839
01:01:03.719 --> 01:01:07.960
words I hearkened in vain for a reply. I grew impatient.

840
01:01:08.559 --> 01:01:17.239
I called aloud for Tonato. No answer. I called again Fortunato.

841
01:01:18.639 --> 01:01:22.840
No answer. Still I thrust a torch through the remaining

842
01:01:22.840 --> 01:01:27.719
aperture and let it fall within. There came forth in

843
01:01:27.800 --> 01:01:33.000
return only a jingling of the bells. My heart grew sick.

844
01:01:33.239 --> 01:01:37.480
On account of the dampness of the catacombs. I hastened

845
01:01:37.480 --> 01:01:40.119
to make an end of my labor. I forced the

846
01:01:40.239 --> 01:01:45.400
last stone into its position. I plastered it up against

847
01:01:45.400 --> 01:01:48.960
the new masonry. I re erected the old rampart of bones.

848
01:01:50.480 --> 01:01:55.159
Half of a century, no mortal has disturbed them. In

849
01:01:55.320 --> 01:02:07.920
Pache requiescat The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar allan

850
01:02:08.039 --> 01:02:16.960
poe impia tortum longas hic turba fores sanguinice inaqui non

851
01:02:17.039 --> 01:02:25.440
setiata aluit sospite nunc patria fracto, nunc foneres antro mors

852
01:02:25.599 --> 01:02:33.639
ube diirafut vita salus patent quatrain composed for the gates

853
01:02:33.639 --> 01:02:36.440
of a market to be erected upon the site of

854
01:02:36.519 --> 01:02:43.880
the Jacobin clubhouse at Paris. I was sick, sick unto

855
01:02:43.960 --> 01:02:48.000
death with that long agony. And when they at length

856
01:02:48.079 --> 01:02:51.559
unbound me and I was permitted to sit, I felt

857
01:02:51.559 --> 01:02:55.760
that my senses were leaving me. The sentence, the dread

858
01:02:55.880 --> 01:02:59.920
sentence of death, was the last of distinct accentuation which

859
01:03:00.079 --> 01:03:04.840
reached my ears. After that, the sound of the inquisitorial

860
01:03:04.920 --> 01:03:11.519
voices seemed merged in one dreamy, indeterminate hum. It conveyed

861
01:03:11.559 --> 01:03:16.559
to my soul the idea of revolution, perhaps from its

862
01:03:16.559 --> 01:03:20.679
association and fancy with the burr of a mill wheel.

863
01:03:21.800 --> 01:03:25.800
This only for a brief period, For presently I heard

864
01:03:25.880 --> 01:03:31.119
no one. Yet for a while I saw, but with

865
01:03:31.199 --> 01:03:34.840
how terrible an exaggeration, I saw the lips of the

866
01:03:34.880 --> 01:03:39.199
black robed judges. They appeared to me white whiter than

867
01:03:39.239 --> 01:03:42.360
the sheet upon which I traced these words, and thin

868
01:03:42.719 --> 01:03:47.239
even to grotesqueness, thin with the intensity of their expression

869
01:03:47.320 --> 01:03:53.800
of firmness, of immovable resolution, of stern contempt, of human torture.

870
01:03:55.079 --> 01:03:57.639
I saw that the decrees of what to me was

871
01:03:57.719 --> 01:04:02.440
fate were still issuing from those lips. I saw them

872
01:04:02.519 --> 01:04:06.840
writhe with a deadly locution. I saw them fashion the

873
01:04:06.880 --> 01:04:12.360
syllables of my name, and I shuddered, because no sound succeeded.

874
01:04:13.519 --> 01:04:17.079
I saw, too, for a few moments of delirious horror,

875
01:04:17.400 --> 01:04:22.199
the soft and nearly imperceptible waving of the sable draperies

876
01:04:22.360 --> 01:04:26.760
which enwrapped the walls of the apartment. And then my

877
01:04:26.920 --> 01:04:31.119
vision fell upon the seven tall candles upon the table.

878
01:04:31.920 --> 01:04:36.480
At first they wore the aspect of charity, and seemed white,

879
01:04:36.599 --> 01:04:42.320
slender angels who would save me. But then all at

880
01:04:42.360 --> 01:04:46.719
once there came a most deadly nausea over my spirit,

881
01:04:47.400 --> 01:04:50.800
and I felt every fiber in my frame thrill, as

882
01:04:50.800 --> 01:04:53.760
if I had touched the wire of a galvanic battery.

883
01:04:54.360 --> 01:04:59.480
While the angel forms became meaningless specters with heads of flame,

884
01:05:00.039 --> 01:05:03.280
and I saw that from them there would be no help.

885
01:05:04.079 --> 01:05:07.400
And then there stole into my fancy like a rich

886
01:05:07.519 --> 01:05:11.880
musical note, the thought of what sweet rest there must

887
01:05:11.920 --> 01:05:17.519
be in the grave. The thought came gently and stealthily,

888
01:05:17.960 --> 01:05:21.679
and it seemed long before it attained full appreciation. But

889
01:05:22.000 --> 01:05:25.599
just as my spirit came at length properly to feel

890
01:05:25.639 --> 01:05:30.199
and entertain it, the figures of the judges vanished, as

891
01:05:30.280 --> 01:05:36.199
if magically, from before me. The tall candles sank into nothingness,

892
01:05:36.400 --> 01:05:40.920
Their flames went out utterly, the blackness of darkness supervened.

893
01:05:41.480 --> 01:05:45.679
All sensations appeared, swallowed up in a mad, rushing descent,

894
01:05:46.320 --> 01:05:52.920
as of the soul into hades. Then silence and stillness

895
01:05:53.079 --> 01:05:57.880
and night were the universe. I had swooned, But still

896
01:05:57.920 --> 01:06:01.719
will not say that all of consciousness was lost. What

897
01:06:01.880 --> 01:06:04.840
of it there remained, I will not attempt to define

898
01:06:05.400 --> 01:06:09.440
or even describe. Yet all was not lost in the

899
01:06:09.480 --> 01:06:14.079
deepest slumber, No in delirium, no in a swoon, No

900
01:06:14.679 --> 01:06:20.480
in death, No even in the grave. All is not lost.

901
01:06:21.039 --> 01:06:25.599
Else there is no immortality for man. Arousing from the

902
01:06:25.639 --> 01:06:29.199
most profound of slumbers, we break the gossamer web of

903
01:06:29.280 --> 01:06:33.880
some dream. Yet in a second afterward, so frail may

904
01:06:33.960 --> 01:06:37.480
that web have been. We remember not that we have dreamed.

905
01:06:38.360 --> 01:06:40.719
In the return to life from the swoon, there are

906
01:06:41.079 --> 01:06:46.360
two stages, first that of the sense of mental or spiritual,

907
01:06:47.039 --> 01:06:52.280
secondly that of the sense of physical existence. It seems

908
01:06:52.360 --> 01:06:56.400
probable that, if upon reaching the second stage, we could

909
01:06:56.480 --> 01:06:59.880
recall the impressions of the first, we should find these

910
01:07:00.079 --> 01:07:04.400
impressions eloquent in memories of the gulf beyond. And that

911
01:07:04.519 --> 01:07:10.199
gulf is what how at least shall we distinguish its

912
01:07:10.239 --> 01:07:14.199
shadows from those of the tomb. But if the impressions

913
01:07:14.239 --> 01:07:17.119
of what I have termed the first stage are not

914
01:07:17.400 --> 01:07:21.920
at will recalled, yet after long interval, do they not

915
01:07:22.079 --> 01:07:27.400
come unbidden? While we marvel? Whence they come? He who

916
01:07:27.440 --> 01:07:31.239
has never swooned is not he who finds strange palaces

917
01:07:31.519 --> 01:07:35.719
and wildly familiar faces in coals that glow. Is not

918
01:07:35.880 --> 01:07:39.360
he who beholds, floating in mid air the sad visions

919
01:07:39.559 --> 01:07:42.639
that the many may not view. Is not he who

920
01:07:42.719 --> 01:07:46.559
ponders over the perfume of some novel flower. Is not

921
01:07:46.679 --> 01:07:50.119
he whose brain grows bewildered with the meaning of some

922
01:07:50.519 --> 01:07:56.440
musical cadence which has never before arrested his attention. Amid

923
01:07:56.480 --> 01:08:00.800
frequent and thoughtful endeavors. To remember amid earnest struggles to

924
01:08:00.880 --> 01:08:04.639
regather some token of the state of seeming nothingness in

925
01:08:04.719 --> 01:08:08.679
which my soul had lapsed. There have been moments when

926
01:08:08.719 --> 01:08:13.639
I have dreamed of success. There have been brief, very

927
01:08:13.800 --> 01:08:18.159
brief periods when I have conjured up remembrances which the

928
01:08:18.239 --> 01:08:21.640
lucid reason of a later epoch assures me could have

929
01:08:21.680 --> 01:08:27.199
had reference only to that condition of seeming unconsciousness. These

930
01:08:27.279 --> 01:08:32.600
shadows of memory tell indistinctly of tall figures that lifted

931
01:08:32.640 --> 01:08:38.000
and bore me in silence, down, down, still down, till

932
01:08:38.039 --> 01:08:42.279
a hideous dizziness oppressed me at the mere idea of

933
01:08:42.359 --> 01:08:46.600
the interminableness of the descent. They tell also of a

934
01:08:46.680 --> 01:08:50.399
vague horror at my heart on account of that heart's

935
01:08:50.600 --> 01:08:56.600
unnatural stillness. Then comes a sense of sudden motionlessness throughout

936
01:08:56.640 --> 01:08:59.920
all things, as if those who bore me a gas

937
01:09:00.000 --> 01:09:04.880
bestly train had outrun in their descent the limits of

938
01:09:04.960 --> 01:09:09.359
the limitless, and paused from the wearisomeness of their toil.

939
01:09:10.199 --> 01:09:14.520
After this I called to mind flatness and dampness. And

940
01:09:14.600 --> 01:09:19.560
then all is madness, the madness of a memory which

941
01:09:19.600 --> 01:09:25.000
busies itself among forbidden things. Very suddenly there came back

942
01:09:25.039 --> 01:09:29.079
to my soul. Motion and sound, the tumultuous motion of

943
01:09:29.119 --> 01:09:33.359
the heart, and in my ears the sound of its beating.

944
01:09:34.760 --> 01:09:40.039
Then a pause in which all is blank, Then again

945
01:09:40.319 --> 01:09:46.279
sound and motion, and touch, a tingling sensation pervading my frame.

946
01:09:47.119 --> 01:09:51.640
Then the mere consciousness of existence without thought, a condition

947
01:09:51.760 --> 01:09:59.640
which lasted long, then very suddenly thought and shuddering terror,

948
01:10:00.000 --> 01:10:04.479
an earnest endeavor to comprehend my true state. Then a

949
01:10:04.560 --> 01:10:10.640
strong desire to lapse into insensibility. Then a rushing revival

950
01:10:10.680 --> 01:10:15.680
of soul and a successful effort to move, And now

951
01:10:15.760 --> 01:10:20.119
a full memory of the trial of the judges, of

952
01:10:20.199 --> 01:10:24.880
the sable draperies, of the sentence, of the sickness of

953
01:10:24.920 --> 01:10:30.720
the swoon, then entire forgetfulness of all that followed, of

954
01:10:30.800 --> 01:10:34.560
all that A latter day and much earnestness of endeavor

955
01:10:34.600 --> 01:10:38.960
have enabled me to vaguely recall. So far I have

956
01:10:39.039 --> 01:10:42.319
not opened my eyes. I felt that I lay upon

957
01:10:42.319 --> 01:10:46.520
my back unbound. I reached out my hand and it

958
01:10:46.640 --> 01:10:53.039
fell heavily upon something damp and hard. There I suffered

959
01:10:53.079 --> 01:10:56.359
it to remain for many minutes, while I strove to

960
01:10:56.479 --> 01:11:02.159
imagine where and what I could be. I longed, yet

961
01:11:02.239 --> 01:11:06.399
dared not to employ my vision. I dreaded the first

962
01:11:06.479 --> 01:11:09.800
glance at objects around me. It was not that I

963
01:11:09.880 --> 01:11:13.359
feared to look upon things horrible, but that I grew

964
01:11:13.560 --> 01:11:18.199
aghast lest there should be nothing to see. At length,

965
01:11:18.479 --> 01:11:23.239
with a wild desperation at heart, I quickly unclosed my eyes.

966
01:11:24.640 --> 01:11:30.079
My worst thoughts then were confirmed. The blackness of eternal

967
01:11:30.199 --> 01:11:34.159
night encompassed me. I struggled for breath. The intensity of

968
01:11:34.199 --> 01:11:38.560
the darkness seemed to oppress and stifle me. The atmosphere

969
01:11:38.640 --> 01:11:43.439
was intolerably close. I still lay quietly and made effort

970
01:11:43.520 --> 01:11:48.159
to exercise my reason. I brought to mine the inquisitorial

971
01:11:48.239 --> 01:11:52.920
proceedings and attempted from that point to deduce my real condition.

972
01:11:53.960 --> 01:11:56.720
The sentence had passed, and it appeared to me that

973
01:11:56.760 --> 01:12:01.319
a very long interval of time had since elapsed. Yet

974
01:12:01.359 --> 01:12:04.560
not for a moment did I suppose myself actually dead.

975
01:12:05.399 --> 01:12:09.520
Such a supposition, notwithstanding what we read in fiction, is

976
01:12:09.560 --> 01:12:15.199
altogether inconsistent with real existence. But where and in what

977
01:12:15.439 --> 01:12:20.399
state was I the condemned to death I knew perished

978
01:12:20.520 --> 01:12:24.359
usually at the Ottos Daffi, and one of these had

979
01:12:24.359 --> 01:12:26.800
been held on the very night of the day of

980
01:12:26.880 --> 01:12:30.720
my trial. Had I been remanded to my dungeon to

981
01:12:30.800 --> 01:12:34.359
await the next sacrifice, which would not take place for

982
01:12:34.560 --> 01:12:39.199
many months. This I at once saw could not be

983
01:12:40.239 --> 01:12:45.159
victims had been in immediate demand. Moreover, my dungeon, as

984
01:12:45.159 --> 01:12:49.159
well as all the condemned cells at Toledo, had stone floors,

985
01:12:49.560 --> 01:12:54.279
and light was not altogether excluded. A fearful idea now

986
01:12:54.359 --> 01:12:58.279
suddenly drove the blood in torrents upon my heart, and

987
01:12:58.359 --> 01:13:02.600
for a brief period I once more relapsed into insensibility.

988
01:13:03.880 --> 01:13:08.439
Upon recovering, I at once started to my feet, trembling

989
01:13:08.560 --> 01:13:13.079
convulsively in every fiber. I thrust my arms wildly above

990
01:13:13.119 --> 01:13:17.520
and around me in all directions. I felt nothing, yet

991
01:13:17.600 --> 01:13:20.760
dreaded to move a step lest I should be impeded

992
01:13:20.800 --> 01:13:25.199
by the walls of a tomb. Perspiration burst from every

993
01:13:25.239 --> 01:13:29.399
pore and stood in cold, big beads upon my forehead.

994
01:13:30.079 --> 01:13:33.760
The agony of suspense grew at length intolerable, and I

995
01:13:33.960 --> 01:13:38.319
cautiously moved forward, with my arms extended and my eyes

996
01:13:38.439 --> 01:13:41.439
straining from their sockets, in the hope of catching some

997
01:13:41.760 --> 01:13:46.199
faint ray of light. I proceeded for many paces, but

998
01:13:46.319 --> 01:13:51.159
still all was blackness and vacancy. I breathed more freely.

999
01:13:51.800 --> 01:13:55.319
It seemed evident that mine was not at least the

1000
01:13:55.359 --> 01:13:59.880
most hideous of fates. And now, as I still continued

1001
01:14:00.119 --> 01:14:04.760
to step cautiously onward, there came thronging upon my recollection

1002
01:14:05.159 --> 01:14:09.800
a thousand vague rumors of the horrors of Toledo, of

1003
01:14:09.840 --> 01:14:14.880
the dungeons. There had been strange things, narrated fables I

1004
01:14:14.920 --> 01:14:18.680
had always deemed them, but yet strange and too ghastly

1005
01:14:18.760 --> 01:14:22.399
to repeat save in a whisper. Was I left to

1006
01:14:22.520 --> 01:14:27.119
perish of starvation in this subterranean world of darkness? Or

1007
01:14:27.199 --> 01:14:33.359
what fate, perhaps even more fearful awaited me? That the

1008
01:14:33.439 --> 01:14:36.520
result would be death, and a death of more than

1009
01:14:36.600 --> 01:14:40.199
customary bitterness. I knew too well the character of my

1010
01:14:40.359 --> 01:14:44.199
judges to doubt. The mode and the hour were all

1011
01:14:44.279 --> 01:14:49.199
that occupied or distracted me. My outstretched hands, at length

1012
01:14:49.520 --> 01:14:54.560
encountered some solid obstruction. It was a wall, seemingly of

1013
01:14:54.640 --> 01:15:02.279
stone masonry, very smooth, slimy, and I followed it up,

1014
01:15:02.880 --> 01:15:06.680
stepping with all the careful distrust with which certain antique

1015
01:15:06.760 --> 01:15:11.760
narratives had inspired me. This process, however, afforded me no

1016
01:15:11.960 --> 01:15:15.479
means of ascertaining the dimensions of my dungeon. As I

1017
01:15:15.560 --> 01:15:18.119
might make its circuit and return to the point whence

1018
01:15:18.159 --> 01:15:21.640
I set out, without being aware of the fact, so

1019
01:15:21.920 --> 01:15:27.199
perfectly uniform seemed the wall. I therefore sought the knife,

1020
01:15:27.319 --> 01:15:29.920
which had been in my pocket when led into the

1021
01:15:29.920 --> 01:15:35.000
inquisitorial chamber, But it was gone. My clothes had been

1022
01:15:35.039 --> 01:15:38.760
exchanged for a wrapper of coarse surge. I had thought

1023
01:15:38.840 --> 01:15:42.479
of forcing the blade in some minute crevice of the masonry,

1024
01:15:43.079 --> 01:15:47.960
so as to identify my point of departure. The difficulty, nevertheless,

1025
01:15:48.600 --> 01:15:51.920
was but trivial, although in the disorder of my fancy

1026
01:15:52.119 --> 01:15:55.680
it seemed at first insupperable. I tore a part of

1027
01:15:55.720 --> 01:15:58.640
the hem from the robe and placed the fragment at

1028
01:15:58.640 --> 01:16:02.960
full length and at right angles to the wall. Engroping

1029
01:16:03.000 --> 01:16:05.680
my way around the prison. I could not fail to

1030
01:16:05.800 --> 01:16:10.199
encounter this rag upon completing the circuit, so at least,

1031
01:16:10.479 --> 01:16:13.800
I thought. But I had not counted upon the extent

1032
01:16:13.880 --> 01:16:18.000
of the dungeon, or upon my own weakness. The ground

1033
01:16:18.119 --> 01:16:21.800
was moist and slippery. I staggered onward for some time.

1034
01:16:22.359 --> 01:16:26.359
When I stumbled and fell. My excessive fatigue induced me

1035
01:16:26.439 --> 01:16:33.159
to remain prostrate, and sleep soon overtook me. As I lay,

1036
01:16:34.319 --> 01:16:38.920
upon awaking and stretching forth an arm I found beside

1037
01:16:38.920 --> 01:16:42.000
me a loaf and a pitcher with water. I was

1038
01:16:42.039 --> 01:16:45.840
too much exhausted to reflect upon my circumstance, but ate

1039
01:16:45.920 --> 01:16:50.399
and drank with avidity. Shortly after I resumed my tour

1040
01:16:50.600 --> 01:16:54.079
around the prison, and with much toil, came at last

1041
01:16:54.159 --> 01:16:58.760
upon the fragment of the surge. Up to the period

1042
01:16:58.800 --> 01:17:02.680
when I fell, I counted fifty two paces, and upon

1043
01:17:02.760 --> 01:17:06.479
resuming my walk I had counted forty eight more. When

1044
01:17:06.520 --> 01:17:09.840
I arrived at the rag there were in all then

1045
01:17:10.359 --> 01:17:13.920
a hundred paces, and admitting two paces to the yard,

1046
01:17:14.239 --> 01:17:17.399
I presumed the dungeon to be fifty yards in circuit.

1047
01:17:17.920 --> 01:17:20.920
I had met, however, with many angles in the wall,

1048
01:17:21.319 --> 01:17:23.720
and thus I could form no guess at the shape

1049
01:17:23.760 --> 01:17:26.920
of the vault. For vault, I could not help supposing

1050
01:17:26.960 --> 01:17:31.199
it to be. I had little object, certainly no hope

1051
01:17:31.520 --> 01:17:35.399
in these researches, but a vague curiosity prompted me to

1052
01:17:35.439 --> 01:17:39.760
continue them. Quitting the wall, I resolved to cross the

1053
01:17:39.800 --> 01:17:44.359
area of the enclosure. At first, I proceeded with extreme caution,

1054
01:17:45.000 --> 01:17:49.359
for the floor, although seemingly of solid material, was treacherous

1055
01:17:49.399 --> 01:17:53.000
with slime. At length, however, I took courage and did

1056
01:17:53.079 --> 01:17:57.000
not hesitate to step firmly, endeavoring to cross in as

1057
01:17:57.039 --> 01:18:00.720
direct a line as possible. I had advanced some ten

1058
01:18:00.880 --> 01:18:03.920
or twelve paces in this manner when the remnant of

1059
01:18:03.960 --> 01:18:08.039
the torn hem of my robe became entangled between my legs,

1060
01:18:08.720 --> 01:18:12.119
I stepped on it and fell violently on my face.

1061
01:18:13.520 --> 01:18:17.119
In the confusion attending my fall, I did not immediately

1062
01:18:17.159 --> 01:18:21.720
apprehend a somewhat startling circumstance, which, yet, in a few

1063
01:18:21.760 --> 01:18:26.199
seconds afterward, and while I still lay prostrate, arrested my attention.

1064
01:18:27.039 --> 01:18:30.239
It was this. My chin rested upon the floor of

1065
01:18:30.279 --> 01:18:32.960
the prison, but my lips and the upper portion of

1066
01:18:33.000 --> 01:18:36.880
my head, although seemingly at a less elevation than the chin,

1067
01:18:37.159 --> 01:18:40.960
touched nothing. At the same time, my forehead seemed bathed

1068
01:18:41.000 --> 01:18:44.279
in a clammy vapor, and the peculiar smell of decayed

1069
01:18:44.279 --> 01:18:48.520
fungus arose to my nostrils. I put forward my arm

1070
01:18:48.920 --> 01:18:51.079
and shuddered to find that I had fallen at the

1071
01:18:51.199 --> 01:18:55.600
very brink of a circular pit, whose extent, of course,

1072
01:18:56.119 --> 01:19:00.800
I had no means of ascertaining at the moment. Groping

1073
01:19:00.840 --> 01:19:04.279
about the masonry just below the margin, I succeeded in

1074
01:19:04.359 --> 01:19:08.600
dislodging a small fragment and let it fall into the abyss.

1075
01:19:09.199 --> 01:19:12.800
For many seconds, I hearkened to its reverberations as it

1076
01:19:12.880 --> 01:19:15.680
dashed against the sides of the chasm in its descent.

1077
01:19:16.520 --> 01:19:21.199
At length there was a sullen plunge into water, succeeded

1078
01:19:21.239 --> 01:19:24.920
by loud echoes. At the same moment there came a

1079
01:19:25.000 --> 01:19:28.479
sound resembling the quick opening and as rapid closing of

1080
01:19:28.520 --> 01:19:32.079
a door overhead, while a faint gleam of light flashed

1081
01:19:32.119 --> 01:19:37.960
suddenly through the gloom, and as suddenly faded away. I

1082
01:19:38.039 --> 01:19:41.479
saw clearly the doom which had been prepared for me,

1083
01:19:42.239 --> 01:19:46.520
and congratulated myself upon the timely accident by which I

1084
01:19:46.560 --> 01:19:51.159
had escaped another step before my fall, and the world

1085
01:19:51.199 --> 01:19:54.960
had seen me no more, and the death just avoided.

1086
01:19:55.600 --> 01:19:59.199
Was that very character which I had regarded as fabulous

1087
01:19:59.800 --> 01:20:04.119
and and frivolous in the tales respecting the Inquisition. To

1088
01:20:04.199 --> 01:20:07.159
the victims of its tyranny. There was the choice of

1089
01:20:07.239 --> 01:20:11.880
death with its direst physical agonies, or death with its

1090
01:20:11.920 --> 01:20:15.760
most hideous moral horrors. I had been reserved for the

1091
01:20:15.840 --> 01:20:20.520
latter by long suffering. My nerves had been unstrung until

1092
01:20:20.560 --> 01:20:23.119
I trembled at the sound of my own voice, and

1093
01:20:23.199 --> 01:20:26.560
had become in every respect a fitting subject for the

1094
01:20:26.600 --> 01:20:31.439
specters of torture which awaited me. Shaking in every limb,

1095
01:20:31.760 --> 01:20:35.239
I groped my way back to the wall, resolving there

1096
01:20:35.279 --> 01:20:39.119
to perish rather than risk the terrors of the wells

1097
01:20:39.159 --> 01:20:43.239
of which my imagination now pictured many in various positions

1098
01:20:43.279 --> 01:20:47.319
about the dungeon. In other conditions of mind, I might

1099
01:20:47.359 --> 01:20:50.840
have had courage to end my misery at once by

1100
01:20:50.880 --> 01:20:54.239
a plunge into one of these abysses. But now I

1101
01:20:54.359 --> 01:20:57.960
was the veriest of cowards. Neither could I forget what

1102
01:20:58.039 --> 01:21:01.680
I had read about these pits, that the sudden extinction

1103
01:21:01.840 --> 01:21:05.079
of life formed no part of their most horrible plan.

1104
01:21:06.159 --> 01:21:10.039
Agitation of spirit kept me awake for many long hours,

1105
01:21:10.279 --> 01:21:14.760
but at length I again slumbered. Upon arousing, I found

1106
01:21:14.800 --> 01:21:19.359
my side as before, a loaf and a pitcher of water.

1107
01:21:20.039 --> 01:21:23.520
A burning thirst consumed me, and I emptied the vessel

1108
01:21:23.560 --> 01:21:27.840
at a draft. It must have been drugged, for scarcely

1109
01:21:27.880 --> 01:21:33.159
had I drunk before I became irresistibly drowsy. A deep

1110
01:21:33.279 --> 01:21:37.079
sleep fell upon me, a sleep like that of death.

1111
01:21:37.920 --> 01:21:41.239
How long it lasted, of course, I know not, But

1112
01:21:41.319 --> 01:21:45.720
when once again I unclosed my eyes, the objects around

1113
01:21:45.760 --> 01:21:51.119
me were visible by a wild, sulfurious luster, the origin

1114
01:21:51.199 --> 01:21:53.960
of which I could not at first determine. I was

1115
01:21:54.079 --> 01:21:57.399
enabled to see the extent and aspect of the prison.

1116
01:21:58.279 --> 01:22:02.159
In its size I had been greatly mistaken. The whole

1117
01:22:02.199 --> 01:22:05.399
circuit of its walls did not exceed twenty five yards.

1118
01:22:06.039 --> 01:22:09.119
For some minutes, this fact occasioned me a world of

1119
01:22:09.239 --> 01:22:13.479
vain trouble. Vain indeed, for what could be of less

1120
01:22:13.520 --> 01:22:19.039
importance under the terrible circumstances which environed me than the

1121
01:22:19.119 --> 01:22:24.119
mere dimensions of my dungeon. But my soul took a

1122
01:22:24.199 --> 01:22:28.119
wild interest in trifles, and I busied myself in endeavors

1123
01:22:28.159 --> 01:22:31.199
to account for the error I had committed in my measurement.

1124
01:22:32.199 --> 01:22:35.640
The truth at length flashed upon me. In my first

1125
01:22:35.680 --> 01:22:40.159
attempt at exploration, I had counted fifty two paces up

1126
01:22:40.199 --> 01:22:43.319
to the period when I fell. I must have then

1127
01:22:43.439 --> 01:22:46.640
been within a pace or two of the fragment of surge.

1128
01:22:47.039 --> 01:22:50.279
In fact, I had nearly performed the circuit from the vault.

1129
01:22:50.840 --> 01:22:54.800
I then slept, and upon awaking I must have returned

1130
01:22:54.880 --> 01:22:58.520
upon my steps, thus supposing the circuit nearly double what

1131
01:22:58.600 --> 01:23:02.800
it actually was. My confusion of mind prevented me from

1132
01:23:02.880 --> 01:23:06.199
observing that I began my tour with the wall to

1133
01:23:06.239 --> 01:23:09.479
the left and ended it with the wall to the right.

1134
01:23:10.760 --> 01:23:14.520
I had been deceived too in respect to the shape

1135
01:23:14.520 --> 01:23:18.359
of the enclosure. In feeling my way, I had found

1136
01:23:18.479 --> 01:23:22.720
many angles, and thus deduced an idea of great irregularity.

1137
01:23:23.079 --> 01:23:26.439
So potent is the effect of total darkness upon one

1138
01:23:26.479 --> 01:23:30.680
arousing from lethargy or sleep. The angles were simply those

1139
01:23:30.720 --> 01:23:34.520
of a few slight depressions or niches at odd intervals.

1140
01:23:35.439 --> 01:23:40.079
The general shape of the prison was square. What I

1141
01:23:40.119 --> 01:23:43.920
had taken for masonry seemed now to be iron or

1142
01:23:44.000 --> 01:23:48.199
some other metal, in huge plates whose sutures or joints

1143
01:23:48.239 --> 01:23:53.000
occasioned the depression. The entire surface of this metallick enclosure

1144
01:23:53.319 --> 01:23:56.960
was rudely daubed in all the hideous and repulsive devices

1145
01:23:57.000 --> 01:24:01.079
to which the Charnel superstition of the monks has given rise.

1146
01:24:02.399 --> 01:24:06.199
The figures of fiends and aspects of menace, with skeleton

1147
01:24:06.279 --> 01:24:11.079
forms and other more really fearful images overspread and disfigured

1148
01:24:11.119 --> 01:24:15.680
the walls. I observed that the outlines of these monstrosities

1149
01:24:15.800 --> 01:24:20.960
were sufficiently distinct, but that the colors seemed faded and blurred,

1150
01:24:21.359 --> 01:24:24.800
as if from the effects of a damp atmosphere. I

1151
01:24:24.880 --> 01:24:28.680
now noticed the floor, too, which was of stone. In

1152
01:24:28.720 --> 01:24:32.159
the center yawned the circular pit from whose jaws I

1153
01:24:32.199 --> 01:24:35.920
had escaped, but it was the only one in the dungeon.

1154
01:24:36.880 --> 01:24:40.720
All this I saw indistinctly, and by much effort, for

1155
01:24:40.840 --> 01:24:44.920
my personal condition had been greatly changed during slumber. I

1156
01:24:45.000 --> 01:24:48.840
now lay upon my back and at full length on

1157
01:24:48.920 --> 01:24:52.600
a species of low framework of wood. To this I

1158
01:24:52.760 --> 01:24:56.520
was securely bound by a long strap resembling a surcingle.

1159
01:24:57.239 --> 01:25:00.680
It passed in many convolutions around my limbs and body,

1160
01:25:01.039 --> 01:25:04.760
leaving at liberty only my head and my left arm.

1161
01:25:04.880 --> 01:25:07.680
To such an extent that I could, by dint of

1162
01:25:07.760 --> 01:25:11.520
much exertion, supply myself with food from an earthen dish,

1163
01:25:11.760 --> 01:25:15.279
which lay by my side on the floor. I saw

1164
01:25:15.560 --> 01:25:19.039
to my horror that the pitcher had been removed. I

1165
01:25:19.199 --> 01:25:23.439
say to my horror, for I was consumed with intolerable thirst.

1166
01:25:24.000 --> 01:25:26.760
This thirst, it appeared to be the design of my

1167
01:25:26.880 --> 01:25:30.960
persecutors to stimulate. For the food in the dish was meat,

1168
01:25:31.039 --> 01:25:36.159
pungently seasoned, looking upward, I surveyed the ceiling of my prison.

1169
01:25:36.840 --> 01:25:40.439
It was some thirty or forty feet overhead, and constructed

1170
01:25:40.520 --> 01:25:43.960
much as the side walls. In one of its panels,

1171
01:25:44.000 --> 01:25:48.680
a very singular figure riveted my whole attention. It was

1172
01:25:48.720 --> 01:25:52.560
the painted figure of Time, as he is commonly represented,

1173
01:25:52.920 --> 01:25:56.279
save that in lieu of a scythe He held what,

1174
01:25:56.800 --> 01:26:00.640
at a casual glance I supposed to be the pictured

1175
01:26:00.720 --> 01:26:03.960
image of a huge pendulum, such as we see on

1176
01:26:04.039 --> 01:26:08.800
antique clocks. There was something, however, in the appearance of

1177
01:26:08.840 --> 01:26:12.479
this machine, which caused me to regard it more attentively.

1178
01:26:13.359 --> 01:26:17.159
While I gazed directly upward at it, for its position

1179
01:26:17.319 --> 01:26:20.800
was immediately over my own, I fancied that I saw

1180
01:26:20.800 --> 01:26:25.479
it in motion. In an instant afterward, the fancy was confirmed.

1181
01:26:25.960 --> 01:26:31.600
Its sweep was brief and of course slow. I watched

1182
01:26:31.640 --> 01:26:36.279
it for some minutes, somewhat in fear, but more in wonder.

1183
01:26:37.079 --> 01:26:40.439
Wearied at length with observing its dull movement, I turned

1184
01:26:40.439 --> 01:26:43.399
my eyes upon the other objects in the cell. A

1185
01:26:43.439 --> 01:26:46.760
slight noise attracted my notice, and looking to the floor,

1186
01:26:46.800 --> 01:26:51.279
I saw several enormous rats traversing it. They had issued

1187
01:26:51.319 --> 01:26:54.079
from the well which lay just within view to my right.

1188
01:26:54.840 --> 01:26:59.399
Even then, while I gazed, they came up in troops, hurriedly,

1189
01:26:59.680 --> 01:27:03.079
with ravenous eyes, allured by the scent of the meat.

1190
01:27:04.079 --> 01:27:07.600
From this it required much effort and attention to scare

1191
01:27:07.640 --> 01:27:11.399
them away. It might have been half an hour, perhaps

1192
01:27:11.439 --> 01:27:15.000
even an hour, for I could take but imperfect note

1193
01:27:15.000 --> 01:27:20.439
of time before I again cast my eyes upward. What

1194
01:27:20.560 --> 01:27:25.000
I saw then confounded and amazed me. The sweep of

1195
01:27:25.039 --> 01:27:28.399
the pendulum had increased in extent by nearly a yard

1196
01:27:29.199 --> 01:27:33.119
as a natural consequence. Its velocity was also much greater.

1197
01:27:33.920 --> 01:27:37.239
But what mainly disturbed me was the idea that it

1198
01:27:37.279 --> 01:27:42.359
had perceptibly descended. I now observed with what horror. It

1199
01:27:42.439 --> 01:27:46.520
is needless to say that its nether extremity was formed

1200
01:27:46.560 --> 01:27:50.119
of a crescent of glistening steel, about a foot in

1201
01:27:50.239 --> 01:27:54.479
length from horn to horn, the horns upward, and the

1202
01:27:54.600 --> 01:27:57.520
under edge evidently as keen as that of a razor.

1203
01:27:58.479 --> 01:28:02.840
Like a razor, also, it seemed massy and heavy, tapering

1204
01:28:02.880 --> 01:28:05.920
from the edge into a solid and broad structure. Above

1205
01:28:07.039 --> 01:28:10.279
it was appended to a weighty rod of brass, and

1206
01:28:10.319 --> 01:28:15.760
the whole hissed as it swung through the air. I

1207
01:28:15.840 --> 01:28:18.720
could no longer doubt the doom prepared for me by

1208
01:28:18.800 --> 01:28:23.640
Monkish ingenuity and torture. My cognizance of the pit had

1209
01:28:23.680 --> 01:28:28.800
become known to the inquisitorial agents, the pit whose horrors

1210
01:28:28.840 --> 01:28:32.079
had been destined for so bold a recusant as myself,

1211
01:28:32.800 --> 01:28:37.439
the pit typical of hell, as the ultimathuel of all

1212
01:28:37.560 --> 01:28:41.800
their punishments. The plunge into this pit I had avoided

1213
01:28:41.840 --> 01:28:44.760
by the merest of accidents, And I knew that surprise

1214
01:28:45.039 --> 01:28:49.000
or entrapment into torment formed an important portion of all

1215
01:28:49.039 --> 01:28:53.880
the grotesquery of these dungeon deaths. Having failed to fall,

1216
01:28:54.119 --> 01:28:56.760
it was no part of the demon plan to hurl

1217
01:28:56.800 --> 01:29:01.119
me into the abyss, and thus there being no alternative,

1218
01:29:01.600 --> 01:29:07.720
a different and milder destruction awaited me. Milder I half

1219
01:29:07.800 --> 01:29:11.159
smiled in my agony as I thought of such application

1220
01:29:11.720 --> 01:29:15.000
of such a term. What boots it to tell of

1221
01:29:15.039 --> 01:29:19.279
the long, long hours of horror more than mortal, during

1222
01:29:19.319 --> 01:29:23.479
which I counted the rushing oscillations of the steel inch

1223
01:29:23.760 --> 01:29:29.199
by inch, line by line, with a descent only appreciable

1224
01:29:29.479 --> 01:29:34.720
at intervals that seemed ages down and still down. It

1225
01:29:34.800 --> 01:29:38.840
came days passed. It might have been that many days

1226
01:29:38.880 --> 01:29:42.279
past ere. It swept so closely over me as to

1227
01:29:42.399 --> 01:29:45.680
fan me with its acrid breath. The odor of the

1228
01:29:45.720 --> 01:29:50.199
sharp steel forced itself into my nostrils. I prayed, I

1229
01:29:50.279 --> 01:29:53.359
wearied heaven with my prayer for its more speedy descent.

1230
01:29:53.760 --> 01:29:57.680
I grew frantically mad and struggled to force myself upward

1231
01:29:57.840 --> 01:30:03.279
against the sweep of the fearful scimitar. And then I

1232
01:30:03.439 --> 01:30:10.119
fell suddenly calm, and lay smiling at the glittering death

1233
01:30:10.920 --> 01:30:16.720
as a child at some rare bauble. There was another

1234
01:30:16.800 --> 01:30:21.439
interval of utter insensibility. It was brief, for upon again

1235
01:30:21.600 --> 01:30:25.159
lapsing into life, there had been no perceptible descent in

1236
01:30:25.239 --> 01:30:28.880
the pendulum. But it might have been long, for I

1237
01:30:28.960 --> 01:30:32.399
knew there were demons who took note of my swoon,

1238
01:30:32.800 --> 01:30:36.640
and who could have arrested the vibration at pleasure. Upon

1239
01:30:36.760 --> 01:30:43.600
my recovery, too, I felt very, oh inexpressibly sick and weak,

1240
01:30:44.600 --> 01:30:48.720
as if through long inanition. Even amid the agonies of

1241
01:30:48.760 --> 01:30:53.640
that period, the human nature craved food with painful effort.

1242
01:30:53.680 --> 01:30:57.159
I outstretched my left arm as far as my bounds permitted,

1243
01:30:57.560 --> 01:31:00.520
and took possession of the small remnant which had been

1244
01:31:00.560 --> 01:31:03.760
spared me by the rats. As I put a portion

1245
01:31:03.880 --> 01:31:06.680
of it within my lips, there rushed to my mind

1246
01:31:06.720 --> 01:31:11.760
a half formed thought of joy, of hope. Yet what

1247
01:31:11.960 --> 01:31:15.039
business had I with hope? It was, as I say,

1248
01:31:15.279 --> 01:31:19.119
a half formed thought. Man has many such which are

1249
01:31:19.159 --> 01:31:23.439
never completed. I felt that it was of joy of hope.

1250
01:31:23.920 --> 01:31:26.640
But I felt also that it had perished in its

1251
01:31:26.680 --> 01:31:31.720
formation in vain. I struggled to perfect to regain it.

1252
01:31:31.960 --> 01:31:36.600
Long suffering had nearly annihilated all my ordinary powers of mind.

1253
01:31:37.119 --> 01:31:41.560
I was an imbecile, an idiot. The vibration of the

1254
01:31:41.600 --> 01:31:45.039
pendulum was at right angles to my length. I saw

1255
01:31:45.079 --> 01:31:48.239
that the crescent was designed to cross the region of

1256
01:31:48.279 --> 01:31:51.640
the heart. It would fray the surge of my robe.

1257
01:31:52.399 --> 01:31:57.479
It would return and repeat its operations again and again.

1258
01:31:58.560 --> 01:32:03.039
Notwithstanding its terrific wide sweep some thirty feet or more,

1259
01:32:03.319 --> 01:32:06.880
and the hissing vigor of its descent sufficient to sunder

1260
01:32:06.920 --> 01:32:10.279
these very walls of iron. Still, the fraying of my

1261
01:32:10.439 --> 01:32:13.760
robe would be all that, for several minutes it would accomplish.

1262
01:32:14.760 --> 01:32:19.279
And at this thought I paused. I dared not go

1263
01:32:19.479 --> 01:32:22.960
further than this reflection. I dwelt upon it with a

1264
01:32:23.000 --> 01:32:27.279
pertinacity of attention, as if in so dwelling I could

1265
01:32:27.359 --> 01:32:31.520
arrest here the descent of the steel. I forced myself

1266
01:32:31.560 --> 01:32:34.039
to ponder upon the sound of the crescent as it

1267
01:32:34.079 --> 01:32:38.680
should pass across the garment, Upon the peculiar thrilling sensation

1268
01:32:39.199 --> 01:32:43.159
which the friction of cloth produces on the nerves. I

1269
01:32:43.239 --> 01:32:50.800
pondered upon all this frivolity until my teeth were on edge.

1270
01:32:51.279 --> 01:32:56.560
Down steadily, down it crept. I took a frenzied pleasure

1271
01:32:56.640 --> 01:33:01.640
in contrasting its downward with its lateral velocity to the right,

1272
01:33:02.279 --> 01:33:06.319
to the left, far and wide, with the shriek of

1273
01:33:06.359 --> 01:33:09.560
a damned spirit to my heart, with the stealthy pace

1274
01:33:09.600 --> 01:33:14.119
of the tiger. I alternately laughed and howled as the

1275
01:33:14.159 --> 01:33:21.279
one or the other idea grew predominant, down, certainly, relentlessly down,

1276
01:33:21.720 --> 01:33:26.359
it vibrated within three inches of my bosom. I struggled violently,

1277
01:33:26.640 --> 01:33:30.680
furiously to free my left arm. This was free only

1278
01:33:30.720 --> 01:33:33.439
from the elbow to the hand. I could reach the

1279
01:33:33.520 --> 01:33:37.079
ladder from the platter beside me to my mouth with

1280
01:33:37.199 --> 01:33:41.119
great effort. But no farther could I have broken the

1281
01:33:41.159 --> 01:33:44.640
fastenings above the elbow. I would have seized and attempted

1282
01:33:44.680 --> 01:33:47.319
to arrest the pendulum, I might as well have attempted

1283
01:33:47.359 --> 01:33:53.880
to arrest an avalanche. Down, Still, unceasingly, still, inevitably down.

1284
01:33:54.520 --> 01:33:59.079
I gasped and struggled at each vibration. I shrunk convulsively

1285
01:33:59.119 --> 01:34:02.840
at its every sweep. My eyes followed its outward or

1286
01:34:02.960 --> 01:34:06.720
upward whorlds with the eagerness of the most unmeaning despair.

1287
01:34:07.880 --> 01:34:12.439
They closed themselves spasmodically at the descent. Although death would

1288
01:34:12.439 --> 01:34:18.079
have been a relief, oh how unspeakable, Still I quivered

1289
01:34:18.119 --> 01:34:20.800
in every nerve to think how slight a sinking of

1290
01:34:20.800 --> 01:34:27.000
the machinery would precipitate that keen glistening axe upon my bosom.

1291
01:34:28.319 --> 01:34:31.359
It was hope that prompted the nerve to quiver, the

1292
01:34:31.439 --> 01:34:35.159
frame to shrink. It was hope, the hope that triumphs

1293
01:34:35.159 --> 01:34:38.840
on the rack that whispers to the death condemned. Even

1294
01:34:38.880 --> 01:34:42.119
in the dungeons of the inquisition, I saw that some

1295
01:34:42.279 --> 01:34:45.760
ten or twelve vibrations would bring the steel in actual

1296
01:34:45.840 --> 01:34:50.640
contact with my robe. And with this observation there suddenly

1297
01:34:50.680 --> 01:34:55.479
came over my spirit all the keen collected calmness of despair.

1298
01:34:56.159 --> 01:34:59.159
For the first time during many hours or perhaps days,

1299
01:34:59.800 --> 01:35:03.760
I thought it now occurred to me that the bandage

1300
01:35:04.199 --> 01:35:09.680
or surcingle which enveloped me was unique. I was tied

1301
01:35:09.760 --> 01:35:13.760
by no separate cord. The first stroke of the razorlike

1302
01:35:13.840 --> 01:35:17.560
crescent athwart any portion of the band would so detach

1303
01:35:17.600 --> 01:35:20.640
it that it might be unwound from my person by

1304
01:35:20.720 --> 01:35:24.880
means of my left hand. But how fearful in that case,

1305
01:35:25.000 --> 01:35:29.319
the proximity of the steel the result of the slightest struggle,

1306
01:35:29.840 --> 01:35:33.800
How deadly was it likely? Moreover, that the minions of

1307
01:35:33.840 --> 01:35:37.520
the torturer had not foreseen and provided for this possibility?

1308
01:35:38.079 --> 01:35:41.079
Was it probable that the bandage crossed my bosom in

1309
01:35:41.159 --> 01:35:45.600
the track of the pendulum? Dreading defined my feint, and,

1310
01:35:45.680 --> 01:35:49.760
as it seemed my last hope. Frustrated, I so far

1311
01:35:49.840 --> 01:35:52.880
elevated my head as to obtain a distinct view of

1312
01:35:52.920 --> 01:35:57.239
my breast. The surcingle enveloped my limbs and body close

1313
01:35:57.279 --> 01:36:01.840
in all directions save in the path of the destroying crescent.

1314
01:36:02.640 --> 01:36:05.960
Scarcely had I dropped my head back into its original position,

1315
01:36:06.439 --> 01:36:09.159
when there flashed upon my mind what I cannot better

1316
01:36:09.199 --> 01:36:12.760
describe than as the unformed half of that idea of

1317
01:36:12.800 --> 01:36:15.960
which deliverance to which I have previously alluded, and of

1318
01:36:16.000 --> 01:36:20.319
which amity only floated indeterminately through my brain. When I

1319
01:36:20.439 --> 01:36:23.960
raised food to my burning lips. The whole thought was

1320
01:36:23.960 --> 01:36:30.560
now present, feeble, scarcely sane, scarcely definite, but still entire.

1321
01:36:31.439 --> 01:36:34.680
I proceeded at once with the nervous energy of despair

1322
01:36:35.119 --> 01:36:40.199
to attempt its execution. For many hours, the immediate vicinity

1323
01:36:40.199 --> 01:36:43.000
of the low framework upon which I lay had been

1324
01:36:43.039 --> 01:36:49.760
literally swarming with rats. They were wild, bold, ravenous, their

1325
01:36:49.800 --> 01:36:52.560
red eyes glaring upon me as if they waited but

1326
01:36:52.720 --> 01:36:56.039
for the motionlessness on my part to make me their

1327
01:36:56.079 --> 01:36:59.800
prey to what food? I thought, have they been a

1328
01:37:00.000 --> 01:37:04.279
customed in the well they had devoured in spite of

1329
01:37:04.319 --> 01:37:07.119
all my efforts to prevent them, all but a small

1330
01:37:07.239 --> 01:37:10.680
remnant of the contents of the dish I had fallen

1331
01:37:10.680 --> 01:37:13.720
into a habitual see saw or wave of the hand

1332
01:37:13.760 --> 01:37:18.279
about the platter. And at length the unconscious uniformity of

1333
01:37:18.319 --> 01:37:23.000
the movement deprived it of effect. In their veracity, the

1334
01:37:23.119 --> 01:37:27.560
vermin frequently fastened their sharp fangs in my fingers. With

1335
01:37:27.680 --> 01:37:31.199
the particles of the oily and spicy viand which now remained,

1336
01:37:31.520 --> 01:37:35.359
I thoroughly rubbed the bandage wherever I could reach it. Then,

1337
01:37:35.760 --> 01:37:39.479
raising my hand from the floor, I lay breathlessly still.

1338
01:37:40.680 --> 01:37:43.920
At first the ravenous animals were startled and terrified at

1339
01:37:43.960 --> 01:37:48.760
the change. At the cessation of movement, they shrank alarmedly back.

1340
01:37:49.199 --> 01:37:52.399
Many sought the well. But this was only for a moment.

1341
01:37:53.079 --> 01:37:56.880
I had not counted in vain upon their veracity. Observing

1342
01:37:56.920 --> 01:37:59.720
that I remained without motion, one or two of the

1343
01:38:00.039 --> 01:38:03.880
oldest leaped upon the framework and smelt at the surcigal.

1344
01:38:04.880 --> 01:38:08.319
This seemed the signal for a general rush forth from

1345
01:38:08.359 --> 01:38:11.600
the well. They hurried in fresh troops. They clung to

1346
01:38:11.640 --> 01:38:15.039
the wood, they overran it, and leaped in hundreds upon

1347
01:38:15.119 --> 01:38:18.840
my person. The measured movement of the pendulum disturbed them,

1348
01:38:18.840 --> 01:38:22.640
not at all, avoiding its strokes, they busied themselves with

1349
01:38:22.680 --> 01:38:26.880
the anointed bandage. They pressed. They swarmed upon me in

1350
01:38:26.960 --> 01:38:31.359
ever accumulating heaps. They writhed upon my throat, their cold

1351
01:38:31.439 --> 01:38:34.680
lips sought my own. I was half stifled by their

1352
01:38:34.720 --> 01:38:38.239
thronging pressure. Disgust for which the world has no name,

1353
01:38:38.680 --> 01:38:42.199
swelled my bosom and chilled with a heavy clamminess my heart.

1354
01:38:43.159 --> 01:38:46.319
Yet one minute and I felt that the struggle would

1355
01:38:46.359 --> 01:38:50.680
be over plainly I perceived the loosening of the bandage.

1356
01:38:50.920 --> 01:38:53.199
I knew that in more than one place it must

1357
01:38:53.239 --> 01:38:57.239
be already severed. With a more than human resolution, I

1358
01:38:57.319 --> 01:39:01.279
lay still. Nor had I erred in my calculations, nor

1359
01:39:01.319 --> 01:39:04.159
had I endured in vain. I at length felt that

1360
01:39:04.279 --> 01:39:08.560
I was free. The surcingle hung in ribbons from my body,

1361
01:39:09.640 --> 01:39:13.079
but the stroke of the pendulum already pressed upon my bosom.

1362
01:39:13.399 --> 01:39:16.039
It had divided the surge of the robe, It had

1363
01:39:16.079 --> 01:39:18.960
cut through the linen beneath twice again. It swung in

1364
01:39:19.000 --> 01:39:22.479
a sharp sense of pain shot through every nerve. But

1365
01:39:22.600 --> 01:39:26.359
the moment of escape had arrived. At a wave of

1366
01:39:26.399 --> 01:39:32.720
my hand. My deliverers hurried tumultuously away with a steady movement, cautious, sidelong,

1367
01:39:32.880 --> 01:39:35.920
shrinking and slow, I slid from the embrace of the

1368
01:39:35.920 --> 01:39:39.479
bandage and beyond the reach of the scimitar. For the

1369
01:39:39.520 --> 01:39:44.079
moment at least I was free. Free, and in the

1370
01:39:44.119 --> 01:39:47.359
grasp of the inquisition. I had scarcely stepped from my

1371
01:39:47.479 --> 01:39:50.439
wooden bed of horror upon the stone floor of the prison.

1372
01:39:50.680 --> 01:39:53.800
When the motion of the hellish machine ceased, and I

1373
01:39:53.840 --> 01:39:58.039
beheld it drawn up by some invisible force through the

1374
01:39:58.079 --> 01:40:01.680
ceiling This was a less and which I took desperately

1375
01:40:01.720 --> 01:40:07.479
to heart. My every motion was undoubtedly watched free. I

1376
01:40:07.520 --> 01:40:10.319
had but escaped death in one form of agony, to

1377
01:40:10.359 --> 01:40:13.560
be delivered unto worse than death in some other. With

1378
01:40:13.680 --> 01:40:17.319
that thought, I rolled my eyes nervously around on the

1379
01:40:17.359 --> 01:40:22.439
barriers of iron that hemmed me in something unusual, some

1380
01:40:22.640 --> 01:40:27.039
change which at first I could not appreciate. Distinctly, it

1381
01:40:27.119 --> 01:40:31.199
was obvious had taken place in the apartment. For many

1382
01:40:31.279 --> 01:40:35.560
minutes of a dreamy and trembling abstraction, I busied myself

1383
01:40:35.560 --> 01:40:40.159
in vain unconnected conjecture. During this period I became aware

1384
01:40:40.239 --> 01:40:43.800
for the first time of the origin of the sulfurious

1385
01:40:43.880 --> 01:40:47.760
light which illuminated the cell. It proceeded from a fissure

1386
01:40:48.399 --> 01:40:51.920
about half an inch in width, extending entirely around the

1387
01:40:51.960 --> 01:40:54.880
prison at the base of the walls, which thus appeared

1388
01:40:54.880 --> 01:40:58.479
and were completely separated from the floor. I endeavored, but

1389
01:40:58.520 --> 01:41:02.399
of course, in vain, to look through the aperture. As

1390
01:41:02.399 --> 01:41:05.520
I arose from the attempt, the mystery of the alteration

1391
01:41:05.640 --> 01:41:09.840
in the chamber broke at once upon my understanding. I

1392
01:41:09.880 --> 01:41:13.399
have observed that although the outlines of the figures upon

1393
01:41:13.439 --> 01:41:17.760
the walls were sufficiently distinct, yet the colors seemed blurred

1394
01:41:17.760 --> 01:41:22.840
and indefinite. These colors had now assumed and were momentarily assuming,

1395
01:41:23.840 --> 01:41:27.439
a startling and most intense brilliancy that gave to the

1396
01:41:27.479 --> 01:41:31.119
spectral and fiendish portraitures, an aspect that might have thrilled

1397
01:41:31.199 --> 01:41:35.760
even firmer nerves than my own. Demon eyes of a

1398
01:41:35.840 --> 01:41:39.800
wild and ghastly vivacity glared upon me in a thousand

1399
01:41:39.840 --> 01:41:44.279
directions where none had been visible before, and gleamed with

1400
01:41:44.359 --> 01:41:46.760
the lurid luster of a fire that I could not

1401
01:41:46.880 --> 01:41:52.439
force my imagination to regard as unreal. Unreal. Even while

1402
01:41:52.439 --> 01:41:55.039
I breathed, there came to my nostrils the breath of

1403
01:41:55.079 --> 01:41:59.359
the vapor of heated iron. A suffocating odor pervaded the prison.

1404
01:41:59.680 --> 01:42:02.319
A dear, deeper glow settled each moment in the eyes

1405
01:42:02.359 --> 01:42:05.720
that glared at my agonies. A richer tint of crimson

1406
01:42:05.800 --> 01:42:10.479
diffused itself over the pictured horrors of blood. I panted,

1407
01:42:10.680 --> 01:42:13.840
I gasped for breath. There could be no doubt of

1408
01:42:13.880 --> 01:42:18.359
the design of my tormentors, Oh, most unrelenting, oh most

1409
01:42:18.560 --> 01:42:22.279
demoniac of men. I shrank from the glowing metal to

1410
01:42:22.359 --> 01:42:24.880
the center of the cell. Amid the thought of the

1411
01:42:24.920 --> 01:42:28.800
fiery destruction that impended the idea of the coolness of

1412
01:42:28.840 --> 01:42:32.760
the well, came over my soul like a bone. I

1413
01:42:32.880 --> 01:42:37.039
rushed to its deadly brink. I threw my straining vision below.

1414
01:42:37.800 --> 01:42:41.720
The glare from the enkindled roof illuminated its inmost recesses.

1415
01:42:42.399 --> 01:42:46.479
Yet for a wild moment did my spirit refuse to

1416
01:42:46.520 --> 01:42:50.600
comprehend the meaning of what I saw. At length, it forced,

1417
01:42:50.760 --> 01:42:53.800
it wrestled its way into my soul. It burned itself

1418
01:42:53.920 --> 01:42:58.079
in upon my shuddering reason. Oh for a voice to speak,

1419
01:42:58.359 --> 01:43:02.800
Oh horror, Oh any horror. But this with a shriek,

1420
01:43:03.119 --> 01:43:05.760
I rushed from the margin and buried my face and

1421
01:43:05.840 --> 01:43:11.640
my hands, weeping bitterly. The heat rapidly increased, and once

1422
01:43:11.720 --> 01:43:14.840
again I looked up, shuddering, as with a fit of

1423
01:43:14.920 --> 01:43:18.279
the AGUEU. There had been a second change in the cell,

1424
01:43:18.520 --> 01:43:22.760
and now the change was obviously in the form as before.

1425
01:43:23.119 --> 01:43:25.680
It was in vain that I at first endeavored to

1426
01:43:25.720 --> 01:43:29.680
appreciate or understand what was taking place. But not long

1427
01:43:29.880 --> 01:43:33.199
was I left in doubt. The inquisitorial vengeance had been

1428
01:43:33.279 --> 01:43:36.600
hurried by my twofold escape, and there was to be

1429
01:43:36.720 --> 01:43:40.399
no more daallying with the king of terrors. The room

1430
01:43:40.479 --> 01:43:43.439
had been square. I saw that two of its iron

1431
01:43:43.520 --> 01:43:49.359
angles were now acute, two consequently obtuse. The fearful difference

1432
01:43:49.439 --> 01:43:53.199
quickly increased with a low, rumbling or moaning sound. In

1433
01:43:53.239 --> 01:43:56.439
an instant the apartment had shifted its form into that

1434
01:43:56.920 --> 01:44:01.359
of a lozenge. But the alteration stopped. No I neither

1435
01:44:01.399 --> 01:44:04.880
hoped nor desired it to stop. I could have clasped

1436
01:44:04.880 --> 01:44:07.119
the red walls to my bosom as a garment of

1437
01:44:07.159 --> 01:44:12.399
eternal peace. Death, I said, any death, but that of

1438
01:44:12.439 --> 01:44:17.000
the pit. Fool Might I not have known that into

1439
01:44:17.039 --> 01:44:19.800
the pit it was the object of the burning iron

1440
01:44:19.880 --> 01:44:23.159
to urge me. Could I resist its glow? Or if

1441
01:44:23.199 --> 01:44:26.600
even that could I withstand its pressure? And now flatter

1442
01:44:26.760 --> 01:44:30.039
and flatter grew the lozenge with a rapidity that left

1443
01:44:30.079 --> 01:44:33.920
me no time for contemplation. Its center, and of course,

1444
01:44:33.960 --> 01:44:37.720
its greatest width, came just over the yawning gulf. I

1445
01:44:37.800 --> 01:44:42.920
shrank back, but the closing walls pressed me resistlessly onward,

1446
01:44:43.720 --> 01:44:46.439
at length from my seared and writhing body. There was

1447
01:44:46.479 --> 01:44:49.399
no longer an inch of foothold on the firm floor

1448
01:44:49.479 --> 01:44:53.479
of the prison. I struggled no more, but the agony

1449
01:44:53.520 --> 01:44:57.800
of my soul found vent in one loud, long and

1450
01:44:58.000 --> 01:45:02.880
final scream of des I felt that I tottered upon

1451
01:45:02.920 --> 01:45:06.920
the brink. I averted my eyes. There was a discordant

1452
01:45:07.000 --> 01:45:11.119
hum of human voices. There was a loud blast as

1453
01:45:11.159 --> 01:45:14.119
of many trumpets. There was a harsh grating, as of

1454
01:45:14.159 --> 01:45:18.600
a thousand thunders. The fiery walls rushed back. An outstretched

1455
01:45:18.760 --> 01:45:22.920
arm caught my own as I fell, fainting into the abyss.

1456
01:45:24.119 --> 01:45:27.960
It was that of General Lasal. The French army had

1457
01:45:28.079 --> 01:45:34.119
entered Toledo. The inquisition was in the hands of its enemies.

1458
01:45:43.760 --> 01:45:52.840
Berenice by Edgar Allan Poe dyceibant me he sodales si

1459
01:45:53.159 --> 01:46:06.520
speccurum amichai visitarum curras MIAs a luquantulu forree levatas eben zaiat.

1460
01:46:07.439 --> 01:46:15.000
Misery is manifold. The wretchedness of Earth is multiform, overreaching

1461
01:46:15.079 --> 01:46:21.079
the wide horizon as the rainbow. Its hues are various

1462
01:46:21.439 --> 01:46:26.399
as the hues of that arch, as distinct too, yet

1463
01:46:26.760 --> 01:46:32.600
as intimately blended, overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow.

1464
01:46:33.840 --> 01:46:37.119
How is it that from beauty I have derived a

1465
01:46:37.199 --> 01:46:44.319
type of unloveliness from the covenant of peace simile of sorrow.

1466
01:46:45.199 --> 01:46:50.000
But as in ethics, evil is a consequence of good,

1467
01:46:50.600 --> 01:46:57.079
so in fact, out of joy is sorrow born. Either

1468
01:46:57.159 --> 01:47:00.640
the memory of past bliss is the anguish of today,

1469
01:47:01.960 --> 01:47:07.479
or the agonies which are have their origin in the

1470
01:47:07.560 --> 01:47:14.800
ecstasies which might have been My baptismal name is Eegeus.

1471
01:47:15.479 --> 01:47:19.399
That of my family I will not mention. Yet there

1472
01:47:19.399 --> 01:47:23.399
are no towers in the land more time honored than

1473
01:47:23.479 --> 01:47:30.399
my gloomy, gray hereditary halls. Our line has been called

1474
01:47:30.439 --> 01:47:36.199
a race of visionaries, and in many striking particulars in

1475
01:47:36.279 --> 01:47:40.159
the character of the family mansion, in the frescoes of

1476
01:47:40.199 --> 01:47:45.359
the chief saloon, in the tapestries of the dormitories, in

1477
01:47:45.439 --> 01:47:50.680
the chiseling of some buttresses in the armory, but more

1478
01:47:50.840 --> 01:47:56.479
especially in the gallery of antique paintings, in the fashion

1479
01:47:56.560 --> 01:48:02.640
of the library chamber, and lastly, in the very peculiar

1480
01:48:02.880 --> 01:48:08.880
nature of the library's contents. There is more than sufficient

1481
01:48:09.000 --> 01:48:15.640
evidence to warrant the belief the recollections of my earliest

1482
01:48:15.760 --> 01:48:20.600
years are connected with that chamber, and with its volumes,

1483
01:48:21.239 --> 01:48:26.920
of which latter I will say no more. Here died

1484
01:48:27.000 --> 01:48:34.000
my mother. Herein was I born But it is mere

1485
01:48:34.119 --> 01:48:39.079
idleness to say that I had not lived before, that

1486
01:48:39.159 --> 01:48:45.399
the soul has no previous existence. You deny it. Let

1487
01:48:45.479 --> 01:48:51.000
us not argue the matter. Convinced myself, I seek not

1488
01:48:51.319 --> 01:48:57.800
to convince. There is, however, a remembrance of aerial forms,

1489
01:48:57.840 --> 01:49:04.479
of spiritual and meaning, eyes, of sounds musical yet sad,

1490
01:49:05.199 --> 01:49:09.479
A remembrance which will not be excluded, a memory like

1491
01:49:09.520 --> 01:49:16.279
a shadow, vague, variable, indefinite, unsteady, and like a shadow

1492
01:49:16.840 --> 01:49:20.520
too in the impossibility of my getting rid of it,

1493
01:49:21.039 --> 01:49:26.880
while the sunlight of my reason shall exist in that chamber.

1494
01:49:27.159 --> 01:49:31.640
Was I born thus, awaking from the long night of

1495
01:49:31.720 --> 01:49:37.399
what seemed but was not nonentity at once into the

1496
01:49:37.560 --> 01:49:43.720
very regions of fairyland, into a palace of imagination, into

1497
01:49:43.760 --> 01:49:49.079
the wild dominions of monastic thought and iradation. It is

1498
01:49:49.199 --> 01:49:53.199
not singular that I gazed around me with a startled

1499
01:49:53.439 --> 01:49:58.720
and ardent eye, that I loitered away my boyhood in

1500
01:49:58.880 --> 01:50:04.479
books and dissipated my youth in reverie. But it is

1501
01:50:04.640 --> 01:50:09.720
singular that, as years rolled away and the noon of

1502
01:50:09.880 --> 01:50:13.439
manhood found me still in the mansion of my father's

1503
01:50:14.680 --> 01:50:19.800
it is wonderful what stagnation there fell upon the springs

1504
01:50:19.840 --> 01:50:25.000
of my life. Wonderful, how total an inversion took place

1505
01:50:25.039 --> 01:50:30.359
in the character of my commonest thought. The realities of

1506
01:50:30.399 --> 01:50:34.520
the world affected me as visions, and as visions only,

1507
01:50:35.439 --> 01:50:39.279
while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became

1508
01:50:40.039 --> 01:50:46.239
in turn, not the material of my everyday existence, but

1509
01:50:46.359 --> 01:50:53.359
in very deed that existence utterly and solely in itself.

1510
01:50:54.000 --> 01:50:58.159
Bearonice and I were cousins, and we grew up together

1511
01:50:58.359 --> 01:51:05.600
in my paternal hall. Yet differently we grew I ill

1512
01:51:05.680 --> 01:51:12.920
of health and buried in gloom. She agile, graceful, and

1513
01:51:13.079 --> 01:51:19.439
overflowing with energy, hers the ramble on the hillside, mine

1514
01:51:20.039 --> 01:51:25.800
the studies of the cloister. I living within my own heart,

1515
01:51:25.960 --> 01:51:30.680
and addicted body and soul to the most intense and

1516
01:51:30.840 --> 01:51:38.640
painful meditation. She roaming carelessly through life, with no thought

1517
01:51:38.880 --> 01:51:43.119
of the shadows in her path or the silent flight

1518
01:51:43.680 --> 01:51:51.960
of the raven winged hours. Berenice. I call upon her, Berenice,

1519
01:51:52.199 --> 01:51:58.159
and from the gray ruins of memory, a thousand tumultuous

1520
01:51:58.199 --> 01:52:06.520
recollections are dartled at the sound Ah. Vividly is her

1521
01:52:06.600 --> 01:52:10.399
image before me now, as in the early days of

1522
01:52:10.439 --> 01:52:16.479
her light heartedness and joy, Oh gorgeous yet fantastic beauty,

1523
01:52:17.159 --> 01:52:22.800
Oh sylph amid the shrubberies of Arnheim, oh n did

1524
01:52:22.960 --> 01:52:30.319
among its fountains. And then then all is mystery and terror,

1525
01:52:31.520 --> 01:52:38.560
and a tale which should not be told. Disease, a

1526
01:52:38.600 --> 01:52:44.159
fatal disease, fell like the simoom upon her frame. And

1527
01:52:44.319 --> 01:52:49.199
even while I gazed upon her, the spirit of change

1528
01:52:49.439 --> 01:52:56.359
swept over her, pervading her mind, her habits, and her character,

1529
01:52:57.319 --> 01:53:04.239
and in a manner the most subtle and terrible, disturbing

1530
01:53:04.399 --> 01:53:10.800
even the identity of her person Alas the destroyer came

1531
01:53:11.119 --> 01:53:16.000
and went, and the victim where was she? I knew

1532
01:53:16.039 --> 01:53:24.000
her not, or knew her no longer as Berenice. Among

1533
01:53:24.119 --> 01:53:29.359
the numerous train of maladies superinduced by that fatal and

1534
01:53:29.520 --> 01:53:34.039
primary one which affected a revolution of so horrible a

1535
01:53:34.199 --> 01:53:38.159
kind in the moral and physical being of my cousin,

1536
01:53:39.199 --> 01:53:43.600
may be mentioned as the most distressing and obstinate in

1537
01:53:43.640 --> 01:53:50.399
its nature, a species of epilepsy, not unfrequently terminating in

1538
01:53:50.479 --> 01:53:58.199
trance itself, trance very nearly resembling positive disillusion, and from

1539
01:53:58.239 --> 01:54:06.439
which her manner of recovery was in most instances startlingly abrupt.

1540
01:54:07.279 --> 01:54:11.560
In the meantime, my own disease, for I have been

1541
01:54:11.600 --> 01:54:14.479
told that I should call it by no other appellation.

1542
01:54:15.680 --> 01:54:20.880
My own disease then grew rapidly upon me and assumed

1543
01:54:21.000 --> 01:54:27.800
finally a monomaniac character of a novel and extraordinary form,

1544
01:54:28.199 --> 01:54:34.840
hourly and momently gaining vigor, and at length obtaining over

1545
01:54:34.920 --> 01:54:43.520
me the most incomprehensible ascendancy. This monomania, if I must

1546
01:54:43.680 --> 01:54:48.520
so term it, consisted in a morbid irritability of those

1547
01:54:48.680 --> 01:54:54.119
properties of the mind in metaphysical science termed the attentive.

1548
01:54:55.239 --> 01:54:59.079
It is more than just probable that I am not understood,

1549
01:55:00.039 --> 01:55:04.079
but I fear indeed that it is in no manner

1550
01:55:04.319 --> 01:55:08.720
possible to convey to the mind of the merely general

1551
01:55:08.800 --> 01:55:14.199
reader an adequate idea of that nervous intensity of interest

1552
01:55:14.319 --> 01:55:19.279
with which, in my case the powers of meditation, not

1553
01:55:19.359 --> 01:55:25.560
to speak, technically busied and buried themselves in the contemplation

1554
01:55:25.760 --> 01:55:31.800
of even the most ordinary objects of the universe, to

1555
01:55:31.920 --> 01:55:36.479
muse for long, unwearied hours with my attention riveted to

1556
01:55:36.600 --> 01:55:41.359
some frivolous device on the margin or in the topography

1557
01:55:41.439 --> 01:55:45.279
of a book, to become absorbed for the better part

1558
01:55:45.359 --> 01:55:49.520
of a summer's day in a quaint shadow falling aslant

1559
01:55:49.600 --> 01:55:54.600
upon the tapestry or upon the door, To lose myself

1560
01:55:54.680 --> 01:55:58.680
for an entire night, in watching the steady flame of

1561
01:55:58.720 --> 01:56:03.159
a lamp, or the embers of a fire, To dream

1562
01:56:03.199 --> 01:56:08.760
away whole days over the perfume of a flower, To

1563
01:56:08.840 --> 01:56:15.279
repeat monotonously some common word, until the sound, by dint

1564
01:56:15.319 --> 01:56:21.079
of frequent repetition, ceased to convey any idea whatever to

1565
01:56:21.159 --> 01:56:26.079
the mind, To lose all sense of motion or physical

1566
01:56:26.159 --> 01:56:32.920
existence by means of absolute bodily quiescence, long and obstinately

1567
01:56:33.000 --> 01:56:37.359
persevered in Such were a few of the most common

1568
01:56:37.960 --> 01:56:42.840
and least pernicious vagaries induced by a condition of the

1569
01:56:42.920 --> 01:56:50.359
mental faculties, not indeed altogether unparalleled, but certainly bidding defiance

1570
01:56:51.039 --> 01:56:58.359
to anything like analysis or explanation. Yet, let me not

1571
01:56:58.560 --> 01:57:05.800
be misapprehended. The undue, earnest and morbid attention thus excited

1572
01:57:05.840 --> 01:57:10.319
by objects in their own nature frivolous, must not be

1573
01:57:10.439 --> 01:57:17.039
confounded in character with that ruminating propensity common to all mankind,

1574
01:57:17.680 --> 01:57:22.640
and more especially indulged in by persons of ardent imagination.

1575
01:57:24.000 --> 01:57:27.760
It was not, even as might be at first supposed,

1576
01:57:28.279 --> 01:57:34.560
an extreme condition or exaggeration of such propensity, but primarily

1577
01:57:34.680 --> 01:57:40.880
and essentially distinct and different. In the one instance, the

1578
01:57:40.960 --> 01:57:47.159
dreamer or enthusiast, being interested by an object, usually not frivolous,

1579
01:57:48.079 --> 01:57:53.199
imperceptibly loses sight of this object in a wilderness of

1580
01:57:53.399 --> 01:58:00.319
deductions and suggestions, issuing therefrom until at the conclusion of

1581
01:58:00.359 --> 01:58:06.359
a day dream often replete with luxury, he finds the incedimentum,

1582
01:58:06.640 --> 01:58:12.479
or first cause of his musings entirely vanished and forgotten.

1583
01:58:13.880 --> 01:58:19.159
In my case, the primary object was invariably frivolous, although

1584
01:58:19.199 --> 01:58:25.039
assuming through the medium of my distempered vision a refracted

1585
01:58:25.159 --> 01:58:31.039
and unreal importance, few deductions, if any, were made, and

1586
01:58:31.119 --> 01:58:36.600
those few pertinaciously returning in upon the original object as

1587
01:58:36.640 --> 01:58:42.479
a center. The meditations were never pleasurable, and at the

1588
01:58:42.600 --> 01:58:47.000
termination of the reverie, the first cause, so far from

1589
01:58:47.039 --> 01:58:53.239
being out of sight, had attained that supernaturally exaggerated interest

1590
01:58:53.840 --> 01:58:59.760
which was the prevailing feature of the disease. In a word,

1591
01:59:00.359 --> 01:59:05.720
the powers of mind, more particularly exercised, were with me,

1592
01:59:06.560 --> 01:59:11.399
as I have said before, the attentive and r with

1593
01:59:11.560 --> 01:59:17.560
the day dreamer, the speculative. My books at this epoch,

1594
01:59:18.239 --> 01:59:22.399
if they did not actually serve to irritate the disorder

1595
01:59:23.039 --> 01:59:28.199
partook it will be perceived largely in their imaginative and

1596
01:59:28.439 --> 01:59:34.600
inconsequential nature of the characteristic qualities of the disorder itself.

1597
01:59:35.800 --> 01:59:40.800
I well remember, among others, the treatise of the noble

1598
01:59:40.840 --> 01:59:48.960
Italian Colius Secundus Curio de amplitudine b te regi d.

1599
01:59:50.079 --> 01:59:55.520
Saint Austin's great work The City of God, the Tertullian

1600
01:59:56.119 --> 02:00:02.439
de Carne Criste, in which the paradoxical sentence mortuis s

1601
02:00:02.560 --> 02:00:10.520
d philus kredible estkia ineptum est et sympeltus resurrects it

1602
02:00:11.359 --> 02:00:19.760
sertem eskia impossibility est occupied my undivided time for many

1603
02:00:19.840 --> 02:00:28.000
weeks of laborious and fruitless investigation. Thus it will appear that,

1604
02:00:28.640 --> 02:00:34.000
shaken from its balance only by trivial things, my reason

1605
02:00:34.159 --> 02:00:40.760
bore resemblance to that ocean crag spoken by Telomi hefeshin which,

1606
02:00:40.840 --> 02:00:45.439
steadily resisting the attacks of human violence and the fiercer

1607
02:00:45.600 --> 02:00:50.039
fury of the waters and the winds, trembled only to

1608
02:00:50.119 --> 02:00:55.760
the touch of the flower called asvadl. And although to

1609
02:00:55.880 --> 02:01:00.279
a careless thinker it might appear a matter beyond deabt

1610
02:01:00.800 --> 02:01:05.760
that the alteration produced by her unhappy malady in the

1611
02:01:05.840 --> 02:01:10.720
moral condition of Bereonice would afford me many objects for

1612
02:01:10.800 --> 02:01:16.600
the exercise of that intense and abnormal meditation whose nature

1613
02:01:16.680 --> 02:01:20.520
I have been at some trouble in explaining. Yet such

1614
02:01:20.680 --> 02:01:25.600
was not in any degree the case in the lucid

1615
02:01:25.680 --> 02:01:32.039
intervals of my infirmity. Her calamity indeed gave me pain, and,

1616
02:01:32.359 --> 02:01:36.640
taking deeply to heart that total wreck of her fare

1617
02:01:37.159 --> 02:01:41.640
and gentle life, I did not fall to ponder frequently

1618
02:01:41.920 --> 02:01:46.560
and bitterly upon the wonder working means by which so

1619
02:01:46.840 --> 02:01:52.079
strange a revolution had been so suddenly brought to pass.

1620
02:01:53.319 --> 02:01:59.279
But these reflections partook not of the idiosyncrasy of my disease,

1621
02:02:00.399 --> 02:02:04.760
and were such as would have occurred under similar circumstances

1622
02:02:05.319 --> 02:02:11.119
to the ordinary mass of mankind, true to its own character.

1623
02:02:11.800 --> 02:02:15.960
My disorder reveled in the less important, but more startling

1624
02:02:16.119 --> 02:02:21.279
changes wrought in the physical frame of Berenice, in the

1625
02:02:21.399 --> 02:02:28.039
singular and most appalling distortion of her personal identity during

1626
02:02:28.159 --> 02:02:34.159
the brightest days of her unparalleled beauty. Most surely I

1627
02:02:34.199 --> 02:02:39.560
had never loved her. In the strange anomaly of my existence,

1628
02:02:40.319 --> 02:02:45.079
feelings with me had never been of the heart, and

1629
02:02:45.199 --> 02:02:50.520
my passions always were of the mind. Through the gray

1630
02:02:50.720 --> 02:02:55.119
of the early morning, among the trellised shadows of the

1631
02:02:55.239 --> 02:02:59.880
forest at noonday, and in the silence of my library

1632
02:03:00.199 --> 02:03:05.359
at night, she had flitted by my eyes, and I

1633
02:03:05.560 --> 02:03:11.560
had seen her not as the living and breathing Berenice,

1634
02:03:11.720 --> 02:03:17.560
but as the bearnice of a dream, not as a

1635
02:03:17.560 --> 02:03:22.399
being of the earth earthy, but not as the abstraction

1636
02:03:22.640 --> 02:03:26.600
of such a being, Not as a thing to admire

1637
02:03:27.680 --> 02:03:33.359
but to analyze, Not as an object of love, but

1638
02:03:33.520 --> 02:03:39.359
as the theme of the more abstruse although desultory speculation,

1639
02:03:40.720 --> 02:03:46.760
and now now I shuddered in her presence, and grew

1640
02:03:46.960 --> 02:03:53.479
pale at her approach. Yet bitterly lamenting her fallen and

1641
02:03:53.640 --> 02:03:59.239
desolate condition, I called to mind that she had loved

1642
02:03:59.239 --> 02:04:04.279
me long, and in an evil moment I spoke to

1643
02:04:04.359 --> 02:04:09.800
her of marriage, and at length the period of our

1644
02:04:10.000 --> 02:04:15.279
nuptials was approaching. When upon an afternoon in the winter

1645
02:04:15.439 --> 02:04:21.439
of the year, one of those unseasonably warm, calm and

1646
02:04:21.640 --> 02:04:27.479
misty days which are the nurse of the beautiful halcyon one,

1647
02:04:27.520 --> 02:04:34.000
I sat and sat as I thought, alone in the

1648
02:04:34.000 --> 02:04:40.199
inner apartment of the library, but uplifting my eyes I

1649
02:04:40.279 --> 02:04:47.079
saw that Berenice stood before me. Was it my own

1650
02:04:47.119 --> 02:04:53.680
excited imagination, or the misty influence of the atmosphere, or

1651
02:04:53.800 --> 02:04:59.119
the uncertain twilight of the chamber, or the gray draperies

1652
02:04:59.239 --> 02:05:04.039
which fell around her figure that caused in it so

1653
02:05:04.319 --> 02:05:12.159
vacillating and indistinct an outline I could not tell. She

1654
02:05:12.359 --> 02:05:17.319
spoke no word, I not for words could I have

1655
02:05:17.479 --> 02:05:22.439
uttered a syllable. An icy chill ran through my frame,

1656
02:05:23.039 --> 02:05:29.880
A sense of insufferable anxiety oppressed me, A consuming curiosity

1657
02:05:30.000 --> 02:05:36.239
pervaded my soul, And sinking back upon the chair, I

1658
02:05:36.319 --> 02:05:43.479
remained for some time, breathless and motionless, with my eyes

1659
02:05:44.079 --> 02:05:52.920
riveted upon her person alas its emaciation was excessive, and

1660
02:05:53.039 --> 02:05:57.039
not one vestige of the former being lurked in any

1661
02:05:57.079 --> 02:06:03.239
single line of the contour. My burning glances at length

1662
02:06:03.359 --> 02:06:10.239
fell upon the face. The forehead was high and very

1663
02:06:10.279 --> 02:06:18.119
pale and singularly placid, and the once jetty hair fell

1664
02:06:18.600 --> 02:06:26.119
partially over it and overshadowed the hollow temples with innumerable ringlets,

1665
02:06:26.159 --> 02:06:34.479
now of vivid yellow and jarring discordantly in their fantastic character.

1666
02:06:35.479 --> 02:06:41.479
With the raining melancholy of the countenance, the eyes were

1667
02:06:41.520 --> 02:06:49.640
lifeless and lustreless and seemingly pupilless, and I shrank involuntarily

1668
02:06:49.800 --> 02:06:54.359
from their glassy stare to the contemplation of the thin

1669
02:06:55.079 --> 02:07:00.239
and shrunken lips. They parted it, and, in a smile

1670
02:07:00.319 --> 02:07:06.840
of peculiar meaning, the teeth of the changed Berenice disclosed

1671
02:07:06.880 --> 02:07:13.319
themselves slowly to my view. Would to God that I

1672
02:07:13.439 --> 02:07:17.560
had never beheld them, or that having done so, I

1673
02:07:17.640 --> 02:07:23.439
had died, For as Jove during the winter season gives

1674
02:07:23.479 --> 02:07:28.039
twice seven days of warmth, men have called this clement

1675
02:07:28.399 --> 02:07:35.000
and temperate time the nurse of the beautiful Halcion Simonides.

1676
02:07:36.680 --> 02:07:40.920
The shutting of a door disturbed me, and looking up,

1677
02:07:41.000 --> 02:07:46.079
I found that my cousin had departed from the chamber,

1678
02:07:47.359 --> 02:07:52.079
but from the disordered chamber of my brain had not

1679
02:07:52.840 --> 02:07:58.960
alas departed, and would not be driven away the white

1680
02:07:59.319 --> 02:08:04.039
and gas spectrum of the teeth, not a speck on

1681
02:08:04.119 --> 02:08:08.079
their surface, not a shade on their enamel, not an

1682
02:08:08.119 --> 02:08:13.239
indenture in their edges, But what that period of her

1683
02:08:13.319 --> 02:08:18.359
smile had sufficed to brand in upon my memory. I

1684
02:08:18.479 --> 02:08:23.600
saw them now, even more unequivocally than I beheld them. Then.

1685
02:08:25.159 --> 02:08:30.119
The teeth, the teeth, they were here and there and everywhere,

1686
02:08:30.159 --> 02:08:36.119
and visibly and palpably before me, long narrow and excessively white,

1687
02:08:36.800 --> 02:08:40.680
with the pale lips writhing about them, as in the

1688
02:08:40.840 --> 02:08:47.159
very moment of their first terrible development. Then came the

1689
02:08:47.199 --> 02:08:52.920
full fury of my monomania, and I struggled in vain

1690
02:08:53.439 --> 02:09:00.079
against its strange and irresistible influence. In the multiplied objects

1691
02:09:00.119 --> 02:09:04.319
of the external world. I had no thoughts but for

1692
02:09:04.439 --> 02:09:09.199
the teeth. For these I longed with a frenzied desire.

1693
02:09:09.720 --> 02:09:14.000
All other matters and all different interests became absorbed in

1694
02:09:14.039 --> 02:09:19.439
their single contemplation. They, they alone, were present to the

1695
02:09:19.520 --> 02:09:25.640
mental eye, and they, in their soul individuality, became the

1696
02:09:25.840 --> 02:09:30.600
essence of my mental life. I held them in every light,

1697
02:09:31.520 --> 02:09:36.239
I turned them in every attitude. I surveyed their characteristics.

1698
02:09:36.520 --> 02:09:41.359
I dwelt upon their peculiarities. I pondered upon their confirmation.

1699
02:09:42.079 --> 02:09:47.000
I mused upon the alteration in their nature. I shuddered

1700
02:09:47.399 --> 02:09:51.880
as I assigned to them in imagination a sensitive and

1701
02:09:52.079 --> 02:09:57.880
sentient power, and, even when unassisted by the lips, a

1702
02:09:58.000 --> 02:10:04.560
capability of moral Russian of mad Sali Salis. It had

1703
02:10:04.600 --> 02:10:11.680
been well said Catu sa pa etuiene des sentiments, and

1704
02:10:11.800 --> 02:10:18.760
of Berenice I more seriously believed catus say tense ettenante

1705
02:10:18.840 --> 02:10:25.399
de idis de IDEs ah. Here was the idiotic thought

1706
02:10:25.479 --> 02:10:31.479
that destroyed me death idees ah. Therefore it was that

1707
02:10:31.560 --> 02:10:36.039
I coveted them so madly. I felt that their possession

1708
02:10:36.159 --> 02:10:40.439
could alone ever restore me to peace, in giving me

1709
02:10:40.640 --> 02:10:46.399
back to reason. And the evening closed in upon me. Thus,

1710
02:10:46.880 --> 02:10:51.760
and then the darkness came and tarried and went, and

1711
02:10:51.840 --> 02:10:55.920
the day again dawned, and the mists of a second

1712
02:10:56.079 --> 02:11:03.359
night were now gathering around. And still I sat motionless

1713
02:11:03.359 --> 02:11:09.239
in that solitary room, And still I sat buried in meditation.

1714
02:11:09.720 --> 02:11:15.039
And still the phantasma of the teeth maintained its terrible ascendancy,

1715
02:11:15.199 --> 02:11:19.880
as with the most vivid, hideous distinctness. It floated about

1716
02:11:20.039 --> 02:11:25.159
amid the changing lights and shadows of the chamber. At length,

1717
02:11:25.319 --> 02:11:29.479
there broke in upon my dreams a cry as of

1718
02:11:29.560 --> 02:11:36.399
horror and dismay. And thereunto, after a pause, succeeded the

1719
02:11:36.479 --> 02:11:41.640
sound of troubled voices, intermingled with many low moanings of

1720
02:11:41.840 --> 02:11:47.560
sorrow or of pain. I arose from my seat, and,

1721
02:11:48.159 --> 02:11:51.840
throwing open one of the doors of the library, saw

1722
02:11:52.000 --> 02:11:57.760
standing out in the antechamber a servant maiden, all in tears,

1723
02:11:58.960 --> 02:12:06.800
who told me that Bereonice was no more. She had

1724
02:12:06.840 --> 02:12:11.640
been seized with epilepsy in the early morning, and now

1725
02:12:12.199 --> 02:12:15.920
at the closing inn of the night, the grave was

1726
02:12:16.000 --> 02:12:21.560
ready for its tenant, and all the preparations for the

1727
02:12:21.600 --> 02:12:27.680
burial were completed. I found myself sitting in the library,

1728
02:12:28.199 --> 02:12:32.880
and again, sitting there alone, it seemed that I had

1729
02:12:32.960 --> 02:12:39.199
newly awakened from a confused and exciting dream. I knew

1730
02:12:39.239 --> 02:12:43.079
that it was now midnight, and I was well aware

1731
02:12:43.800 --> 02:12:49.199
that since the setting of the sun Berenice had been interred.

1732
02:12:50.840 --> 02:12:56.680
But of that dreary period which intervened, I had no positive,

1733
02:12:57.359 --> 02:13:03.720
at least no definitive comprehension. Yet its memory was replete

1734
02:13:04.760 --> 02:13:10.479
with horror. Horror more horrible from being vague, and terror

1735
02:13:10.640 --> 02:13:17.439
more terrible from ambiguity. It was a fearful page in

1736
02:13:17.520 --> 02:13:23.159
the record my existence, written all over with dim and

1737
02:13:23.359 --> 02:13:30.640
hideous and unintelligible recollections. I strived to decipher them, but

1738
02:13:31.880 --> 02:13:37.399
in vain, while ever and anon like the spirit of

1739
02:13:37.439 --> 02:13:41.920
a departed sound, the shrill and piercing shriek of a

1740
02:13:41.960 --> 02:13:48.960
female voice seemed to be ringing in my ears. I

1741
02:13:49.039 --> 02:13:54.119
had done a deed. What was it? I asked myself

1742
02:13:54.159 --> 02:13:58.520
the question aloud, and the whispering echoes of the chamber

1743
02:13:59.319 --> 02:14:05.239
answered me, what was it? On the table beside me

1744
02:14:05.920 --> 02:14:10.680
burned a lamp, and near it lay a little box.

1745
02:14:11.960 --> 02:14:15.920
It was of no remarkable character, and I had seen

1746
02:14:16.000 --> 02:14:20.000
it frequently before, for it was the property of the

1747
02:14:20.000 --> 02:14:25.640
family physician. But how came it there upon my table?

1748
02:14:26.279 --> 02:14:30.920
And why did I shudder in regarding it? These things

1749
02:14:30.960 --> 02:14:34.319
were in no manner to be accounted for. And my

1750
02:14:34.520 --> 02:14:37.760
eyes at length dropped to the open pages of a

1751
02:14:37.800 --> 02:14:43.239
book and to a sentence underscored therein. The words were

1752
02:14:43.239 --> 02:14:48.720
the singular but simple ones of the poet eben zayat

1753
02:14:49.520 --> 02:14:56.520
dis sebont mihi sodales see sepulchurum, i machai visitarum kurras

1754
02:14:56.640 --> 02:15:03.800
MIAs aliquantulum FORI levatas. Why then, as I perused them,

1755
02:15:04.399 --> 02:15:08.600
did the hairs of my head erect themselves on end,

1756
02:15:09.840 --> 02:15:14.760
and the blood of my body become congealed within my veins.

1757
02:15:16.159 --> 02:15:21.319
There came a light tap at the library door, and

1758
02:15:21.520 --> 02:15:25.520
pale as the tenant of a tomb a menial entered

1759
02:15:26.079 --> 02:15:31.159
upon tiptoe. His looks were wild with terror, and he

1760
02:15:31.279 --> 02:15:36.279
spoke to me in a voice tremulous, husky, and very low.

1761
02:15:37.399 --> 02:15:43.359
What said he? Some broken sentences I heard. He told

1762
02:15:43.439 --> 02:15:47.199
of a wild cry, disturbing the silence of the night,

1763
02:15:47.560 --> 02:15:50.600
of the gathering together of the household, of a search

1764
02:15:50.920 --> 02:15:55.960
in the direction of the sound. And then his tones

1765
02:15:56.119 --> 02:16:02.279
grew thrillingly distinct, as he whispered to me of a

1766
02:16:02.439 --> 02:16:07.800
violated grave, of a disfigured body, and shrouded, yet still breathing,

1767
02:16:08.079 --> 02:16:15.479
still palpitating, still alive. He pointed to garments. They were

1768
02:16:15.600 --> 02:16:20.319
muddy and clotted with gore. I spoke not, and he

1769
02:16:20.399 --> 02:16:25.079
took me gently by the hand. It was indented with

1770
02:16:25.159 --> 02:16:31.000
the impress of human nails. He directed my attention to

1771
02:16:31.119 --> 02:16:35.959
some object against the wall. I looked at it for

1772
02:16:36.040 --> 02:16:42.159
some minutes. It was a spade with a shriek. I

1773
02:16:42.360 --> 02:16:45.399
bounded to the table and grasped the box that lay

1774
02:16:45.479 --> 02:16:49.040
upon it, but I could not force it open, and

1775
02:16:49.159 --> 02:16:52.840
in my tremor, it slipped from my hands and fell

1776
02:16:52.920 --> 02:16:57.000
heavily and burst into pieces. And from it, with a

1777
02:16:57.079 --> 02:17:03.879
rattling sound, there rolled out some instruments of dental surgery,

1778
02:17:05.760 --> 02:17:15.399
intermingled with thirty two small, white and ivory looking substances

1779
02:17:16.440 --> 02:17:21.559
that were scattered to and fro about the floor.