It was that which is no longer.

To be naught but a remainder!  Such a thing is beyond the power of language to express.  To exist no more, yet to persist; to be in the abyss, yet out of it; to reappear above death as if indissoluble—­there is a certain amount of impossibility mixed with such reality.  Thence comes the inexpressible.  This being—­was it a being?  This black witness was a remainder, and an awful remainder—­a remainder of what?  Of nature first, and then of society.  Naught, and yet total.

The lawless inclemency of the weather held it at its will; the deep oblivion of solitude environed it; it was given up to unknown chances; it was without defence against the darkness, which did with it what it willed.  It was for ever the patient; it submitted; the hurricane (that ghastly conflict of winds) was upon it.

The spectre was given over to pillage.  It underwent the horrible outrage of rotting in the open air; it was an outlaw of the tomb.  There was no peace for it even in annihilation:  in the summer it fell away into dust, in the winter into mud.  Death should be veiled, the grave should have its reserve.  Here was neither veil nor reserve, but cynically avowed putrefaction.  It is effrontery in death to display its work; it offends all the calmness of shadow when it does its task outside its laboratory, the grave.

This dead thing had been stripped.  To strip one already stripped—­relentless act!  His marrow was no longer in his bones; his entrails were no longer in his body; his voice no longer in his throat.  A corpse is a pocket which death turns inside out and empties.  If he ever had a Me, where was the Me?  There still, perchance, and this was fearful to think of.  Something wandering about something in chains—­can one imagine a more mournful lineament in the darkness?

Realities exist here below which serve as issues to the unknown, which seem to facilitate the egress of speculation, and at which hypothesis snatches.  Conjecture has its compelle intrare.  In passing by certain places and before certain objects one cannot help stopping—­a prey to dreams into the realms of which the mind enters.  In the invisible there 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.