When you reach at last the bottom of this laddered sap that elbows
and compresses you at every step, the evil dream is not ended, for
you find yourself in a lone but very narrow cavern where gloom
reigns, a mere corridor not more than five feet high. If you cease
to stoop and to walk with bended knees, your head violently strikes
the planks that roof the Refuge, and the newcomers are heard to
growl--more or less forcefully, according to their temper and
condition--"Ah, lucky I've got my tin hat on:"
One makes out the gesture of some one who is squatting in an angle.
It is an ambulance man on guard, whose monotone says to each
arrival, "Take the mud off your boots before going in." So you
stumble into an accumulating pile of mud; it entangles you at the
foot of the steps on this threshold of hell.
In the hubbub of lamentation and groaning, in the strong smell of a
countless concentration of wounds, in this blinking cavern of
confused and unintelligible life, I try first to get my bearings.
Some weak candle flames are shining along the Refuge, but they only
relieve the darkness in the spots where they pierce it. At the
farthest end faint daylight appears, as it might to a dungeon
prisoner at the bottom of an oubliette. This obscure vent-hole
allows one to make out some big objects ranged along the corridor;
they are low stretchers, like coffins. Around and above them one
then dimly discerns the movement of broken and drooping shadows, and
the stirring of ranks and groups of specters against the walls.
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