This fragment follows upon the description of the ‘Mountain Heights of
the Exile World’—from their eternally red crags down to their lowest
bogs and ‘sulphur mines.’[1] I beg the reader not to forget that in this
chapter we are plunging with him below the level of the sea and are
concerned exclusively with its slimy bottom, as it was after the tempest
of February.
Almost everything here described has changed and vanished; the political
dregs of the ’fifties are overlaid by fresh sand and fresh mud. This
underworld of agitations and oppressions has ebbed, subsided, died away;
all that is left of it is covered by fresh formations. Its surviving
figures are becoming a rarity, and now I like to meet them.
Some of the specimens I want to preserve are mournfully grotesque,
mournfully ludicrous, but they are all drawn from nature—and they ought
not to vanish without a trace.