So petty, yet so spiteful!  All along,
  Low scrubby alders kneeled down over it;
  Drenched willows flung them headlong in a fit
Of mute despair, a suicidal throng: 
The river which had done them all the wrong,
  Whate’er that was, rolled by, deterred no whit. 120

Which, while I forded,—­good saints, how I feared
  To set my foot upon a dead man’s cheek,
  Each step, or feel the spear I thrust to seek
For hollows, tangled in his hair or beard! 
—­It may have been a water-rat I speared,
  But, ugh! it sounded like a baby’s shriek.

Glad was I when I reached the other bank. 
  Now for a better country.  Vain presage! 
  Who were the strugglers, what war did they wage
Whose savage trample thus could pad the dank 130
Soil to a plash?  Toads in a poisoned tank,
  Or wild cats in a red-hot iron cage—­

The fight must so have seemed in that fell cirque. deg. deg.133
  What penned them there, with all the plain, to choose? 
  No foot-print leading to that horrid mews,
None out of it.  Mad brewage set to work
Their brains, no doubt, like galley-slaves the Turk deg. deg.137
  Pits for his pastime, Christians against Jews.

And more than that—­a furlong on—­why, there! 
  What bad use was that engine deg. for, that wheel, deg.140
  Or brake, not wheel—­that harrow fit to reel
Men’s bodies out like silk? with all the air
Of Tophet’s deg. tool, on earth left unaware, deg.143
  Or brought to sharpen its rusty teeth of steel.

Then came a bit of stubbed ground, once a wood,
  Next a marsh, it would seem, and now mere earth
  Desperate and done with; (so a fool finds mirth,
Makes a thing and then mars it, till his mood
Changes, and off he goes!) within a rood—­
  Bog, clay, and rubble, sand, and stark black dearth. 150

Now blotches rankling, coloured gay and grim,
  Now patches where some leanness of the soil’s
  Broke into moss or substances like boils;
Then came some palsied oak, a cleft in him
Like a distorted mouth that splits its rim
  Gaping at death, and dies while it recoils.

And just as far as ever from the end,
  Naught in the distance but the evening, naught
  To point my footstep further!  At the thought,
A great black bird, Apollyon’s deg. bosom-friend, deg.160
Sailed past, nor beat his wide wing dragon-penned
  That brushed my cap—­perchance the guide I sought.

For, looking up, aware I somehow grew,
  ’Spite of the dusk, the plain had given place
  All round to mountains—­with such name to grace
Mere ugly heights and heaps now stolen in view. 
How thus they had surprised me,—­solve it, you! 
  How to get from them was no clearer case.