mid-desert.

But there was one period that he dared not revive; he could no bear to
think of those weeks of desolation and terror in the winter after his
coming to London. His mind was sluggish, and he could not quite remember
how many years had passed since that dismal experience; it sounded all an
old story, but yet it was still vivid, a flaming scroll of terror from
which he turned his eyes away. One awful scene glowed into his memory,
and he could not shut out the sight of an orgy, of dusky figures whirling
in a ring, of lurid naphtha flares blazing in the darkness, of great
glittering lamps, like infernal thuribles, very slowly swaying in a
violent blast of air. And there was something else, something which he
could not remember, but it filled him with terror, but it slunk in the
dark places of his soul, as a wild beast crouches in the depths of a
cave.

Again, and without reason, he began to image to himself that old
moldering house in the field. With what a loud incessant noise the wind
must be clamoring about on this fearful night, how the great elm swayed
and cried in the storm, and the rain dashed and pattered on the windows,
and dripped on the sodden earth from the shaking shrubs beside the door.
He moved uneasily on his chair, and struggled to put the picture out of
his thoughts; but in spite of himself he saw the stained uneven walls,
that ugly blot of mildew above the window, and perhaps a feeble gleam of
light filtered through the blind, and some one, unhappy above all and for
ever lost, sat within the dismal room. Or rather, every window was black,
without a glimmer of hope, and he who was shut in thick darkness heard
the wind and the rain, and the noise of the elm-tree moaning and beating
and weeping on the walls.

For all his effort the impression would not leave him, and as he sat
before his desk looking into the vague darkness he could almost see that
chamber which he had so often imagined; the low whitewashed ceiling held
up by a heavy beam, the smears of smoke and long usage, the cracks and
fissures of the plaster. Old furniture, shabby, deplorable, battered,
stood about the room; there was a horsehair sofa worn and tottering, and
a dismal paper, patterned in a livid red, blackened and moldered near the
floor, and peeled off and hung in strips from the dank walls. And there
was that odor of decay, of the rank soil steaming, of rotting wood, a
vapor that choked the breath and made the heart full