A dolorous place it was, this canoe house, filled with groans and sighs,
corpses beneath the floor and composing the floor, creatures soon to be
corpses upon the floor,
corpses swinging in aerial sepulchre overhead, long black canoes, high-ended like beaked predatory monsters, dimly looming in the light of a slow fire where sat an ancient of the tribe of Somo at his interminable task of smoke-curing a bushman's head.
The number of
corpses was much smaller than he had imagined, only two more passing him before, at six hundred steps, or about five hundred yards, from the point he had taken to the stream, he came to the end of the tunnel and looked out upon sunlit water, running between grassy banks.
It would be difficult to explain why and whither ants whose heap has been destroyed are hurrying: some from the heap dragging bits of rubbish, larvae, and
corpses, others back to the heap, or why they jostle, overtake one another, and fight, and it would be equally difficult to explain what caused the Russians after the departure of the French to throng to the place that had formerly been Moscow.
A light hath dawned upon me: I need companions--living ones; not dead companions and
corpses, which I carry with me where I will.
A heap of
corpses both of riders and horses lay round the mountain, and many dying men lay groaning there unable to go any farther with their wounded limbs.
And all the time I sat there the necessity of getting back to the ship bore heavily on my already half-congealed spirits - the shivering in glazed tramcars, the stumbling over the snow- sprinkled waste ground, the vision of ships frozen in a row, appearing vaguely like
corpses of black vessels in a white world, so silent, so lifeless, so soulless they seemed to be.
Naturally, the distant witness supposed they were now looking upon three
corpses; so they could hardly believe their eyes when they presently saw two of the men rise to their feet and bend over the third.
Two of the
corpses appeared to have been partially devoured as though by wolves.
He said if we could find that
corpse we would be celebrated, and more talked about than if we got drownded.
He then took up the
corpse and carried it into his wife's room, nearly driving her crazy with fright.
This nephew, whose name was Pennifeather, would listen to nothing like reason in the matter of "lying quiet," but insisted upon making immediate search for the "
corpse of the murdered man.
One might doubt in seasons of cold reflection; but not then, in the presence of her
corpse. It asserted its own tranquillity, which seemed a pledge of equal quiet to its former inhabitant.