Page 534 - for-the-term-of-his-natural-life

below, and fasten upon him in the darkness. His imagina-
tion—always sufficiently vivid, and spurred to an unnatural
effect by the exciting scenes of the previous night—painted
each patch of shadow, clinging bat-like to the humid wall,
as some globular sea-spider ready to drop upon him with its
viscid and clay-cold body, and drain out his chilled blood,
enfolding him in rough and hairy arms. Each splash in the
water beneath him, each sigh of the multitudinous and mel-
ancholy sea, seemed to prelude the laborious advent of some
mis-shapen and ungainly abortion of the ooze. All the sen-
sations induced by lapping water and regurgitating waves
took material shape and surrounded him. All creatures that
could be engendered by slime and salt crept forth into the
firelight to stare at him. Red dabs and splashes that were liv-
ing beings, having a strange phosphoric light of their own,
glowed upon the floor. The livid encrustations of a hundred
years of humidity slipped from off the walls and painfully
heaved their mushroom surfaces to the blaze. The red glow
of the unwonted fire, crimsoning the wet sides of the cav-
ern, seemed to attract countless blisterous and transparent
shapelessnesses, which elongated themselves towards him.
Bloodless and bladdery things ran hither and thither noise-
lessly. Strange carapaces crawled from out of the rocks. All
the horrible unseen life of the ocean seemed to be rising
up and surrounding him. He retreated to the brink of the
gulf, and the glare of the upheld brand fell upon a rounded
hummock, whose coronal of silky weed out-floating in the
water looked like the head of a drowned man. He rushed to
the entrance of the gallery, and his shadow, thrown into the