The pause, however, was momentary, for instantly
the deep, tumultuous movement was resumed that yet was silent as a
cavern underground. I felt the agony that was in it, the passionate
striving, the awful struggle to escape. The semi-darkness held
beseeching faces that fought to press themselves upon my vision,
yearning yet hopeless eyes, lips scorched and dry, mouths that opened to
implore but found no craved delivery in actual words, and a fury of
misery and hate that made the life in me stop dead, frozen by the horror
of vain pity. That intolerable, vain Hope was everywhere.
And the multitude, it came to me, was not a single multitude, but many;
for, as soon as one huge division pressed too close upon the edge of
escape, it was dragged back by another and prevented. The wild host was
divided against itself. Here dwelt the Shadow I had "imagined" weeks
ago, and in it struggled armies of lost souls as in the depths of some
bottomless pit whence there is no escape. The layers mingled, fighting
against themselves in endless torture. It was in this great Shadow I had
clairvoyantly seen Mabel, but about its fearful mouth, I now was
certain, hovered another figure of darkness, a figure who sought to keep
it in existence, since to her thought were due those lampless depths of
woe without escape.
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