are dark portals ajar. No one could have met this dead man without
meditating.

In the vastness of dispersion he was wearing silently away. He had had
blood which had been drunk, skin which had been eaten, flesh which had
been stolen. Nothing had passed him by without taking somewhat from
him. December had borrowed cold of him; midnight, horror; the iron,
rust; the plague, miasma; the flowers, perfume. His slow disintegration
was a toll paid to all--a toll of the corpse to the storm, to the rain,
to the dew, to the reptiles, to the birds. All the dark hands of night
had rifled the dead.

He was, indeed, an inexpressibly strange tenant, a tenant of the
darkness. He was on a plain and on a hill, and _he was not_. He was
palpable, yet vanished. He was a shadow accruing to the night. After the
disappearance of day into the vast of silent obscurity, he became in
lugubrious accord with all around him. By his mere presence he increased
the gloom of the tempest and the calm of stars. The unutterable which is
in the desert was condensed in him. Waif of an unknown fate, he
commingled with all the wild secrets of the night. There was in his
mystery a vague reverberation of all enigmas.

About him life seemed sinking to its lowest depths. Certainty and
confidence appeared to diminish in his environs. The shiver of the
brushwood and the grass, a desolate melancholy, an anxiety in which a
conscience seemed to lurk, appropriated with tragic force the whole
landscape to that black figure suspended by the chain. The presence of a
spectre in the horizon is an aggravation of solitude.

He was a Sign. Having unappeasable winds around him, he was implacable.