As the putrefaction of the brain advanced, the bursting of the pustules
occasionally overlapped, with the result that the confusion and
exaggeration of madness with all its poignancy was super-added to the
simpler hell. One might have thought that any confusion would have been
a welcome relief to a lucidity so appalling; but this was not so. The
torture was infused with a shattering sense of alarm.
The images rose up threatening, disappeared only by blasting themselves
into pultaceous coprolite which was, as it were, the main body of
the army which composed Arthur. Deeper and deeper as he dropped the
phenomena grew constantly in every sense. Now they were a jungle in
which the obscurity and terror of the whole gradually overshadowed even
the abhorrence due to every part.
The madness of the living is a thing so abominable and fearful as
to chill every human heart with horror; it is less than nothing in
comparison with the madness of the dead!
A further complication now arose, in the destruction irrevocable and
complete of that compensating mechanism of the brain, which is the
basis of the sense of time. Hideously distorted and deformed as it had
been in the derangement of the brain like a shapeless jelly shooting
out, of a sudden, vast, unsuspected tentacles, the destruction of
it cut a thousand-fold deeper. The sense of consecution itself was
destroyed; things sequent appeared as things superposed or concurrent
spatially; a new dimension unfolded; a new destruction of all
limitation exposed a new and unfathomable abyss.
To all the rest was added the bewilderment and fear which earthly
agarophobia faintly shadows forth; and at the same time the close
immurement weighed upon him, since from infinitude there can be no
escape.
Add to this the hopelessness of the monotony of the situation.
Infinitely as the phenomena were varied, they were yet recognised as
essentially the same. All human tasks are lightened by the certainty
that they must end. Even our joys would be intolerable were we
convinced that they must endure, through irksomeness and disgust,
through weariness and satiety, even for ever and for evermore. In this
inhuman, this praeterdiabolic inferno was a wearisome repetition,
a harping on the same hateful discord, a continuous nagging whose
intervals afforded no relief, only a suspense brimming with the
anticipation of some fresh terror.
For hours which were to him eternities this stage continued as each
cell that held the record of a memory underwent the degenerative
changes which awoke it into hyperbromic purulence.