on the upper lands, and willows, flags, reeds, and rushes on the lower.
These crumbling ruins still more choked the stream, and almost, if not
quite, turned it back. If any water ooze past, it is not perceptible,
and there is no channel through to the salt ocean. It is a vast stagnant
swamp, which no man dare enter, since death would be his inevitable
fate.

There exhales from this oozy mass so fatal a vapour that no animal can
endure it. The black water bears a greenish-brown floating scum, which
for ever bubbles up from the putrid mud of the bottom. When the wind
collects the miasma, and, as it were, presses it together, it becomes
visible as a low cloud which hangs over the place. The cloud does not
advance beyond the limit of the marsh, seeming to stay there by some
constant attraction; and well it is for us that it does not, since at
such times when the vapour is thickest, the very wildfowl leave the
reeds, and fly from the poison. There are no fishes, neither can eels
exist in the mud, nor even newts. It is dead.

The flags and reeds are coated with slime and noisome to the touch;
there is one place where even these do not grow, and where there is
nothing but an oily liquid, green and rank. It is plain there are no
fishes in the water, for herons do not go thither, nor the kingfishers,
not one of which approaches the spot. They say the sun is sometimes
hidden by the vapour when it is thickest, but I do not see how any can
tell this, since they could not enter the cloud, as to breathe it when
collected by the wind is immediately fatal. For all the rottenness of a
thousand years and of many hundred millions of human beings is there
festering under the stagnant water, which has sunk down into and
penetrated the earth, and floated up to the surface the contents of the
buried cloacæ.