17
Giles then, the soul of honor?there he stands Frank as ten years ago when knighted first. What honest man should dare (he said) he durst.
Good?but the scene shifts?faugh! what hangman hands Pin to his breast a parchment? His own bands Read it. Poor traitor, spit upon and cursed!
18
Better this present than a past like that; Back therefore to my darkening path again! No sound, no sight as far as eye could strain.
Will the night send a howlet? or a bat? mvl I asked: when something on the dismal flat Came to arrest my thoughts and change their train.
19
A sudden little river crossed my path As unexpected as a serpent comes. No sluggish tide congenial to the glooms;
This, as it frothed by, might have been a bath For the fiend's glowing hoof?to see the wrath Of its black eddy bespate0 with flakes and spumes. bespattered
20
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.
21
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.
22
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 Soil to a plash?? Toads in a poisoned tank, puddle Or wild cats in a red-hot iron cage?
23 The fight must so have seemed in that fell cirque.0 dreadful arena What penned them there, with all the plain to choose?
.
1270 / ROBERT BROWNING
135 No footprint leading to that horrid mews,8 None out of it. Mad brewage set to work Their brains, no doubt, like galley slaves the Turk
Pits for his pastime, Christians against Jews.
M And more than that?a furlong on?why, there! 140 What bad use was that engine for, that wheel, Or brake,9 not wheel?that harrow fit to reel Men's bodies out like silk? with all the air Of Tophet's0 tool, on earth left unaware, hell's Or brought to sharpen its rusty teeth of steel.
25
145 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 rood1 150 Bog, clay and rubble, sand and stark black dearth.
26
Now blotches rankling, colored 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 155 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,
160 A great black bird, Apollyon's2 bosom friend, Sailed past, nor beat his wide wing dragon-penned3 That brushed my cap?perchance the guide I sought.
28
For, looking up, aware I somehow grew, 'Spite of the dusk, the plain had given place
165 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.
29
Yet half I seemed to recognize some trick 170 Of mischief happened to me, God knows when? In a bad dream perhaps. Here ended, then, Progress this way. When, in the very nick
