The Pit and the Pendulum

...the agony of my soul found vent in one loud, long and final scream of despair.

I call to mind flatness and dampness; and then all is madness - the madness of a memory which busies itself among forbidden things.

In the deepest slumber-no! In delirium-no! In a swoon-no! In death-no! even in the grave all is not lost.

And then there stole into my fancy, like a rich musical note, the thought of what sweet rest there must be in the grave.

I could have clasped the red walls to my bosom as a garment of eternal peace. "Death," I said, "any death but that of the pit!" Fool! might I have not known that into the pit it was the object of the burning iron to urge me?

No es que me atemorizara mirar cosas horribles, sino que me aterraba la idea de no ver nada.

In death - no! even in the grave all is not lost. Else there is no immortality for man. Arousing from the most profound slumbers, we break the gossamer web of some dream. Yet in a second afterward, (so frail may that web have been) we remember not that we have dreamed.

all sensations appeared swallowed up in a mad rushing descent as of the soul into Hades. Then silence, and stillness, and night were the universe.

He who has never swooned, is not he who finds strange palaces and wildly familiar faces in coals that glow; is not he who beholds floating in mid-air the sad visions that the many may not view; is not he who ponders over the perfume of some novel flower -- is not he whose brain grows bewildered with the meaning of some musical cadence which has never before arrested his attention.

How at least shall we distinguish its shadows from those of the tomb?

Yet what business had I with hope?

- and with this observation there suddenly came over my spirit all the keen, collected calmness of despair. For the first time during many hours - or perhaps days - I thought.

Yet, for a while, I saw—but with how terrible an exaggeration! I saw the lips of the black-robed judges. They appeared to me white—whiter than the sheet upon which I trace these words—and thin even to grotesqueness; thin with the intensity of their expression of firmness—of immoveable resolution—of stern contempt of human torture. I saw that the decrees of what to me was Fate were still issuing from those lips. I saw them writhe with a deadly locution. I saw them fashion the syllables of my name; and I shuddered because no sound succeeded.

After this I call to mind flatness and dampness; and then all is madness - the madness of a memory which busies itself among forbidden things.

No es que me aterrorizara contemplar cosas horribles, sino que me aterraba la idea de no ver nada.