"Young man, did you ever use tobacco?"
"I both smoked and chewed in my lifetime," I faltered, "but..."
"THEN TO HELL WITH YOU!" he shouted in a voice of thunder.
Instantly the gate closed without noise, and I was flung, hurled, from
the battlement, down! down! down! Faster and faster I sank in a dizzy,
sickening whirl into an unfathomable space of gloom. The light faded.
Dampness and darkness were round about me. As before, for days and days
I rose exultant in the light, so now forever I sank into thickening
darkness,--and yet not darkness, but a pale, ashy light more fearful.
In the dimness, I at length discovered a wall before me. It ran up and
down and on either hand endlessly into the night. It was solid, black,
terrible in its frowning massiveness.
Straightway I alighted at the gate,--a dismal crevice hewn into the
dripping rock. The gate was wide open, and there sat-I knew him at once;
who does not?--the Arch Enemy of mankind. He cocked his eye at me in an
impudent, low, familiar manner that disgusted me. I saw that I was not
to be treated like a gentleman.
"Well, young man," said he, rising, with a queer grin on his face, "what
are you sent here for?"
"For using tobacco," I replied.
"Ho!" shouted he in a jolly manner, peculiar to devils, "that's what
most of 'em are sent here for now."
Without more ado, he called four lesser imps, who ushered me within.
What a dreadful plain lay before me! There was a vast city laid out in
regular streets, but there were no houses. Along the streets were places
of torment and torture exceedingly ingenious and disagreeable. For miles
and miles, it seemed, I followed my conductors through these horrors,
Here was a deep vat of burning tar. Here were rows of fiery ovens. I
noticed several immense caldron kettles of boiling oil, upon the rims
of which little devils sat, with pitchforks in hand, and poked down the
helpless victims who floundered in the liquid. But I forbear to go into
unseemly details. The whole scene is as vivid in my mind as any earthly
landscape.
After an hour's walk my tormentors halted before the mouth of an
oven,--a furnace heated seven times, and now roaring with flames. They
grasped me, one hold of each hand and foot. Standing before the blazing
mouth, they, with a swing, and a "one, two, THREE...."
I again assure the reader that in this narrative I have set down nothing
that was not actually dreamed, and much, very much of this wonderful
vision I have been obliged to omit.
Haec fabula docet: It is dangerous for a young man to leave off the use
of tobacco.