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THE HASHISH-EATER
With tremors of a silken-sighing mirth,And whispers of the innumerable king,Breathing a tale of ancient pestilence,Whose very words are vile contagion. ThenI reach a room where caryatides,Carved in the form of tall, voluptuous Titan women,Surround a throne of flowering ebonyWhere creeps a vine of crystal. On the throne,There lolls a wan, enormous Worm, whose bulk,Tumid with all the rottenness of kings,O'erflows its arms with fold on creasèd foldOf fat obscenely bloating. Open-mouthedHe leans, and from his throat a score of tongues,Depending like to wreaths of torpid vipers,Drivel with phosphorescent slime, that runsDown all his length of soft and monstrous folds,And creeping among the flow'rs of ebony,Lends them the life of tiny serpents. Now,Ere the Horror ope those red and lashless slitsOf eyes that draw the gnat and midge, I turn,And follow down a dusty hall, whose gloom,Lined by the statues with their mighty limbs,Ends in a golden-roofed balconySphering the flowered horizon.Ere my heartHath hushed the panic tumult of its pulses,I listen, from beyond the horizon's rim,A mutter faint as when the far simoon,Mounting from unknown deserts, opens forth,Wide as the waste, those wings of torrid nightThat fling the doom of cities from their folds,And musters in its van a thousand winds,That with disrooted palms for besoms, riseAnd sweep the sands to fury. As the storm,Approaching, mounts and loudens to the earsOf them that toil in fields of sesame,So grows the mutter, and a shadow creepsAbove the gold horizon, like a dawn
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