And, hurriedly, he raised his
      head from his hand, and stood forth upon the rock and listened. But there was no voice throughout the vast illimitable desert,
      and the characters upon the rock were SILENCE. And the man
      shuddered, and turned his face away, and fled afar off, in haste,
      so that I beheld him no more.”

      Now there are fine tales in the volumes of the Magi—in the
      iron-bound, melancholy volumes of the Magi. Therein, I say, are
      glorious histories of the Heaven, and of the Earth, and of the
      mighty sea—and of the Genii that over-ruled the sea, and the
      earth, and the lofty heaven. There was much lore too in the
      sayings which were said by the Sybils; and holy, holy things were
      heard of old by the dim leaves that trembled around Dodona—but,
      as Allah liveth, that fable which the Demon told me as he sat by
      my side in the shadow of the tomb, I hold to be the most
      wonderful of all! And as the Demon made an end of his story, he
      fell back within the cavity of the tomb and laughed. And I could
      not laugh with the Demon, and he cursed me because I could not
      laugh. And the lynx which dwelleth forever in the tomb, came out
      therefrom, and lay down at the feet of the Demon, and looked at
      him steadily in the face. THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH. The “Red Death” had long devastated the country. No pestilence
      had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and
      its seal—the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp
      pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the
      pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and
      especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which
      shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his
      fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress and termination of
      the disease, were the incidents of half an hour. But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his
      presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the
      knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the
      deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys. This was an
      extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince’s
      own eccentric yet august taste. A strong and lofty wall girdled
      it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having
      entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts. They resolved to leave means neither of ingress or egress to the
      sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within. The abbey
      was amply provisioned. With such precautions the courtiers might
      bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of
      itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think. The
      prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were
      buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers,
      there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these
      and security were within. Without was the “Red Death.”

      It was toward the close of the fifth or sixth month of his
      seclusion, and while the pestilence raged most furiously abroad,
      that the Prince Prospero entertained his thousand friends at a
      masked ball of the most unusual magnificence. It was a voluptuous scene, that masquerade. But first let me tell
      of the rooms in which it was held. There were seven—an imperial
      suite. In many palaces, however, such suites form a long and
      straight vista, while the folding doors slide back nearly to the
      walls on either hand, so that the view of the whole extent is
      scarcely impeded. Here the case was very different; as might have
      been expected from the duke’s love of the bizarre. The apartments
      were so irregularly disposed that the vision embraced but little
      more than one at a time. There was a sharp turn at every twenty
      or thirty yards, and at each turn a novel effect. To the right
      and left, in the middle of each wall, a tall and narrow Gothic
      window looked out upon a closed corridor which pursued the
      windings of the suite. These windows were of stained glass whose
      color varied in accordance with the prevailing hue of the
      decorations of the chamber into which it opened. That at the
      eastern extremity was hung, for example, in blue—and vividly blue
      were its windows. The second chamber was purple in its ornaments
      and tapestries, and here the panes were purple. The third was
      green throughout, and so were the casements. The fourth was
      furnished and lighted with orange—the fifth with white—the sixth
      with violet. The seventh apartment was closely shrouded in black
      velvet tapestries that hung all over the ceiling and down the
      walls, falling in heavy folds upon a carpet of the same material
      and hue. But in this chamber only, the color of the windows
      failed to correspond with the decorations. The panes here were
      scarlet—a deep blood color. Now in no one of the seven apartments
      was there any lamp or candelabrum, amid the profusion of golden
      ornaments that lay scattered to and fro or depended from the
      roof. There was no light of any kind emanating from lamp or
      candle within the suite of chambers. But in the corridors that
      followed the suite, there stood, opposite to each window, a heavy
      tripod, bearing a brazier of fire that projected its rays through
      the tinted glass and so glaringly illumined the room. And thus
      were produced a multitude of gaudy and fantastic appearances. But
      in the western or black chamber the effect of the fire-light that
      streamed upon the dark hangings through the blood-tinted panes,
      was ghastly in the extreme, and produced so wild a look upon the
      countenances of those who entered, that there were few of the
      company bold enough to set foot within its precincts at all. It was in this apartment, also, that there stood against the
      western wall, a gigantic clock of ebony.