University of Virginia Library

25. CHAPTER XXV.
IN THE CITY OF DIS.

AT the end of his brickmaking, our adventurer found
himself with a tolerable suit of clothes—somewhat
darned—on his back, several blood-blisters in his palms,
and some verdigris coppers in his pocket. Forthwith,
to seek his fortune, he proceeded on foot to the capital,
entering, like the king, from Windsor, from the Surrey
side.

It was late on a Monday morning, in November—a
Blue Monday—a Fifth of November—Guy Fawkes'
Day!—very blue, foggy, doleful and gunpowdery, indeed,
as shortly will be seen, that Israel found himself wedged
in among the greatest everyday crowd which grimy London
presents to the curious stranger: that hereditary
crowd—gulf-stream of humanity—which, for continuous
centuries, has never ceased pouring, like an endless shoal
of herring, over London Bridge.

At the period here written of, the bridge, specifically
known by that name, was a singular and sombre pile,
built by a cowled monk—Peter of Colechurch—some

five hundred years before. Its arches had long been
crowded at the sides with strange old rookeries of disproportioned
and toppling height, converting the bridge at
once into the most densely occupied ward and most
jammed thoroughfare of the town, while, as the skulls of
bullocks are hung out for signs to the gateways of shambles,
so the withered heads and smoked quarters of traitors,
stuck on pikes, long crowned the Southwark entrance.

Though these rookeries, with their grisly heraldry, had
been pulled down some twenty years prior to the present
visit, still enough of grotesque and antiquity clung to the
structure at large to render it the most striking of objects,
especially to one like our hero, born in a virgin clime,
where the only antiquities are the forever youthful heavens
and the earth.

On his route from Brentford to Paris, Israel had passed
through the capital, but only as a courier; so that
now, for the first time, he had time to linger, and
loiter, and lounge—slowly absorb what he saw—meditate
himself into boundless amazement. For forty years he
never recovered from that surprise—never, till dead, had
done with his wondering.

Hung in long, sepulchral arches of stone, the black,
besmoked bridge seemed a huge scarf of crape, festooning
the river across. Similar funeral festoons spanned it
to the west, while eastward, towards the sea, tiers and
tiers of jetty colliers lay moored, side by side, fleets of
black swans.

The Thames, which far away, among the green fields of
Berks, ran clear as a brook, here, polluted by continual

vicinity to man, curdled on between rotten wharves,
one murky sheet of sewerage. Fretted by the ill-built
piers, awhile it crested and hissed, then shot balefully
through the Erebus arches, desperate as the lost souls
of the harlots, who, every night, took the same plunge.
Meantime, here and there, like awaiting hearses, the
coal-scows drifted along, poled broadside, pell-mell to the
current.

And as that tide in the water swept all craft on, so a
like tide seemed hurrying all men, all horses, all vehicles
on the land. As ant-hills, the bridge arches crawled
with processions of carts, coaches, drays, every sort of
wheeled, rumbling thing, the noses of the horses behind
touching the backs of the vehicles in advance, all bespattered
with ebon mud—ebon mud that stuck like Jews'
pitch. At times the mass, receiving some mysterious
impulse far in the rear, away among the coiled thorough-fares
out of sight, would start forward with a spasmodie
surge. It seemed as if some squadron of centaurs, on
the thither side of Phlegethon, with charge on charge,
was driving tormented humanity, with all its chattels,
across.

Whichever way the eye turned, no tree, no speck of
any green thing was seen—no more than in smithies.
All laborers, of whatsoever sort, were hued like the men
in foundries. The black vistas of streets were as the
galleries in coal mines; the flagging, as flat tomb-stones,
minus the consecration of moss, and worn heavily down,
by sorrowful tramping, as the vitreous rocks in the cursed
Gallipagos, over which the convict tortoises crawl.

As in eclipses, the sun was hidden; the air darkened;
the whole dull, dismayed aspect of things, as if some
neighboring volcano, belching its premonitory smoke,
were about to whelm the great town, as Herculaneum
and Pompeii, or the Cities of the Plain. And as they
had been upturned in terror towards the mountain, all
faces were more or less snowed or spotted with soot.
Nor marble, nor flesh, nor the sad spirit of man, may in
this cindery City of Dis abide white.

As retired at length, midway, in a recess of the bridge,
Israel surveyed them, various individual aspects all but
frighted him. Knowing not who they were; never
destined, it may be, to behold them again; one after the
other, they drifted by, uninvoked ghosts in Hades. Some
of the wayfarers wore a less serious look; some seemed
hysterically merry; but the mournful faces had an earnestness
not seen in the others: because man, “poor player,”
succeeds better in life's tragedy than comedy.

Arrived, in the end, on the Middlesex side, Israel's
heart was prophetically heavy; foreknowing, that being
of this race, felicity could never be his lot.

For five days he wandered and wandered. Without
leaving statelier haunts unvisited, he did not overlook
those broader areas—hereditary parks and manors of
vice and misery. Not by constitution disposed to
gloom, there was a mysteriousness in those impulses
which led him at this time to rovings like these. But
hereby stoic influences were at work, to fit him at a soon-coming
day for enacting a part in the last extremities
here seen; when by sickness, destitution, each busy ill

of exile, he was destined to experience a fate, uncommon
even to luckless humanity—a fate whose crowning qualities
were its remoteness from relief and its depth of
obscurity—London, adversity, and the sea, three Armageddons,
which, at one and the same time, slay and
secrete their victims.