The Body Snatcher

It might be better to pretend that this story never happened, which of course it did. Graverobbers are for obvious reasons of supply some of history's most chronicled criminals, yet with the explosion of medical science in the mid-nineteenth century, it was not graves which were violated but the bodies themselves. These bodies were sold in parts to anatomists and medical students for scientific purposes and tomb after tomb went hollow. Even more morbid is the fact that demand began to get fussier and fresher bodies became all the rage, leading one particular team to pursue the freshest bodies out there, those of the still living. The actions of William Burke and his accomplice were so notorious as to be immortalized in a verb, so when we meet Fettes and Macfarlane in this small masterpiece of horror, we understand them to be his direct descendants.

The story begins with their unwanted reunion: Fettes is constantly soused and impecunious; Macfarlane, garbed in the finest boutique-bought whitewash, a successful London physician. They meet by chance and are none too pleased about it, for their consciences share crimes of diabolical scheming. It turns out both were once students of a certain K., a physician who collected cadavers for his own medical experiments, and had no qualms or questions about the work of his minions. The tale is too brief to provide much characterization of their sinister master, so we only get the following snippet:

There was at that period, a certain extramural teacher of anatomy, whom I shall designate by the letter K. His name was subsequently too well known. The man who bore it skulked through the streets of Edinburgh in disguise, while the mob that applauded at the execution of Burke called loudly for the blood of his employer. But Mr. K- was then at the top of his vogue; he enjoyed a popularity due partly to his own talent and address, partly to the incapacity of his rival, the university professor. The students, at least, swore by his name, and Fettes believed himself, and was believed by others, to have laid the foundations of success when he had acquired the favour of this meteorically famous man. 

That K. is really Stevenson’s compatriot Robert Knox is not so much a secret as a literary device to prevent the piece from becoming historical journalism. Suffice it to say that imagining two of Knox’s suppliers, with a few pale strokes of ghoulish vengeance thrown in for good measure, would make a glorious tale of horror (not unlike what would be produced half a century later in a very different setting). Stevenson’s genius does not allow him, however, to stop at the Gothic. The arc of such a story (devised and perfected by, among others, this author) is built in five acts: the re-encounter, the origin of their acquaintance, an “agenbite of inwit,” the appearance of an even greater evil, and then the destiny of all souls involved. You might think the opening section clumsy and almost unconnected to the meat of the tale, and you would not be wrong. But the story makes us wait for the integrant appearance of a man called Gray.

Gray is a marvelous sketch in the annals of literature, a being that barely defiles more than two pages and yet is etched deep in our memory. He becomes, I can say without being indiscreet, the unremovable stain. These are all evildoers, but there is something about him that outhowls the other devils:

This was a small man, very pale and dark, with coal–black eyes. The cut of his features gave a promise of intellect and refinement which was but feebly realised in his manners, for he proved, upon a nearer acquaintance, coarse, vulgar, stupid. He exercised, however, a very remarkable control over Macfarlane; issued orders like the Great Bashaw; became inflamed at the least discussion or delay, and commented rudely on the servility with which he was obeyed. This most offensive person took a fancy to Fettes on the spot, plied him with drinks, and honoured him with unusual confidences on his past career. If a tenth part of what he confessed were true, he was a very loathsome rogue; and the lad’s vanity was tickled by the attention of so experienced a man.

The end looms the moment Macfarlane is obliged to foot the bill for their long and gluttonous night, and then spend the next day “squiring the intolerable Gray from tavern to tavern.” This all culminates in a scene in a carriage that could be taken (substituting a car or train for the fly) from any contemporary horror film. If you haven’t read Stevenson, you are missing one of literature’s unheralded giants, capable of portraying both sides of human nature in equal load (as he does in a more famous work, one of the most perfect literary creations of all time). In The Body Snatcher, there is only one side, and it is remarkably vile; but its vileness wields the distinct advantage of making us cringe in fear of dark and darting shapes in the night. Endless, blackest night, that is. 

The Jewel of Seven Stars

There is little in the way of evidence that we understand what this ancient civilization truly accomplished. We have disinterred tombs, deciphered a hieratic language of obscure characters and darker gods, and mimicked the Egyptians’ customs and designs endlessly in an array of films and media (to the last any self-respecting horror fan will attest). Yet what we haven’t understood so dwarfs our discoveries that pensive minds tend to consider a rather terrible alternative: the Egyptians were so far ahead of their age as to remain uncanny forever. Canopic jars, thurification that has proven irreproducible, astronomy that may be more accurate than we care to imagine, mummifying techniques never seen before or since – never mind the everlasting monuments that have symbolized the country in our imagination. For a number of reasons the Egypt of today has little in common with its glorious past, but one thing from which it has not strayed is its ability to enchant and attract. One of the prototypes of Egypt’s mysteries can be found in this seminal novel.

Our hero and first-person narrator is Malcolm Ross, a nice name for a nice fellow. He is a single London barrister, quite professional and Victorian in the sense that he feels a deeply rooted repulsion towards the easy virtues that men in his position routinely enjoy. What he wants is a wife, a goddess he can place upon a pedestal and focus his awe upon until his ghost departs. We learn these facts quickly but as sidelights to another tale. A certain Margaret Trelawny, a young, retiring, raven-haired beauty, calls upon Ross to help her tend to her father Abel, who just happens to be a wealthy, world-famous Egyptologist and also just happens to have fallen into an unexplained hypnotic stupor. Ross comes racing in heart and leg only to find a wicked scene: the explorer is unconscious, bleeding from an odd scratch on a bangled wrist, his room of Egyptian antiquities sealed from within; he also lies at a strange angle to a safe whose contents shall remain unidentified for most of our story. A physician, a couple of incredulous policemen, and a band of snooping household staff all combine for a plain body of voices and visions – not one being of any particular interest – yet as a whole they provide a fine chorus for what is essentially a romance cast against a Gothic landscape. In the face of upped precautions the next night the event repeats itself (with the added bonus of a catatonic nurse), at which point Ross, a hopeless Romantic to begin with, now comes to consider that something otherworldly may be the catalyst. The policemen wish to instill in Ross the notion of empirical proof; the servants are aghast at the poltergeist-like attacks and quit in droves. But Ross is in love (detractors may carp that the novel devotes far too many pages to hand-holding and unrequited affection) and nothing on earth or beyond could drag him away from the object of his obsession. That is, until the appearance of a frantic polymath by the name of Corbeck.

A leather-faced collaborator of Margaret’s father just arrived from an operose three-year excursion on his partner’s dime, Corbeck’s degrees and level of learning are so extraordinary as to broach the inhuman. After some debate on the theft of a set of seven Pharaonic lamps that Corbeck insists are unique, Ross is handed a 17^th-century Dutch travelogue on a tomb, a jewel, and a sinister mummy hand that guards that same jewel outside of its sarcophagus. The hand, you see, has seven fingers, and the jewel it protects contains the constellation of seven stars that appear to compose a sort of mandate from heaven. In time, we hear of a young and beautiful Queen Tera who inherits the throne as very much the envy of a theocratic cabal thirsting for power. We are regaled on stories of the Queen’s innovation and intelligence as our novel progresses, but that is not how the Dutch traveler van Huyn recalls an episode from his journey:

The fellaheen absolutely refused to enter the valley at such a time, alleging that they might be caught by the night before they could emerge from the other end. At first they would give no reason for their fear. They had hitherto gone anywhere I wished, and at any time, without demur. On being pressed, however, they said that the place was the Valley of the Sorcerer, where none might come in the night. On being asked to tell of the Sorcerer, they refused, saying there was no name, and that they knew nothing. On the next morning, however, when the sun was up and shining down the valley, their fears had somewhat passed away. Then they told me that a great Sorcerer in ancient days – ‘millions of millions of years’ was the term they used – a King or a Queen, they could not say which, was buried there. They could not give the name, persisting to the last that there was no name; and that anyone who should name it would waste away in life so that at death nothing of him would remain to be raised again in the Other World.

Ross reads on to find a fantastic sepulcher as well as the sorcerer in question – or at least, the curse that followed the desecrators and their loot. If you’ve seen a couple of mummy movies, the consequences of such greed will be quite clear to you.  As will the oddly parallel lives of Margaret and the much-beleaguered seven-fingered Queen.  

There are a few conclusions to draw about the novel that recommend themselves upon re-reading. We have the very distinct impression that our opening scene may not appear to be what it claims; we also comprehend that a human being who has willed herself seven digits cannot be holy. There is also the not nugatory matter of the novel’s two editions. The original, published to much vitriol in 1903, features an ending quite in keeping with the cataclysmic predictions of the forerunning chapters. It also contains a chapter omitted in the 1912 edition entitled “Powers – Old and New,” that holds forth elegantly and quite reasonably on the implications of the discovery at hand. While the ‘happy ending’ of the 1912 can at best be termed lamentable and at worst incoherent, the omission of the 1903 edition’s sixteenth chapter might be the more egregious sin. It is in this brief chapter that Ross, an introspective and overly sensitive young man, mulls history as a whole, its myths and its gods, the visions of artists who looked askance at the basic notions of divine power and glory:

The whole possibility of the Great Experiment to which we were now pledged was based on the reality of the existence of the Old Forces which seemed to be coming in contact with the New Civilization. That there were, and are, such cosmic forces we cannot doubt, and that the Intelligence, which is behind them, was and is. Were those primal and elemental forces controlled at any time by other than that Final Cause which Christendom holds as its very essence? If there were truth at all in the belief of Ancient Egypt then their Gods had real existence, real power, real force …. If then the Old Gods held their forces, wherein was the supremacy of the new? ….What was it that Milton saw with his blind eyes in the rays of poetic light falling between him and Heaven? Whence came that stupendous vision of the Evangelist which has for eighteen centuries held spellbound the intelligence of Christendom?

This is the precise reasoning of a Christian, but also of any monotheist gazing at the dynasties that allegedly yielded only one ruler who wished to believe in a single universal force. There is, anyway, something more than a little off-putting about gods with the heads of hyenas or birds. Not that you'd ever know that from all their modern acolytes. 

The Problem of Thor Bridge

Most men have a little private reserve of their own in some corner of their souls where they don't welcome intruders.

A fortune for one man that was more than he needed should not be built on ten thousand ruined men who were left without the means of life.

We wonder at times why it seems so easy for certain people to devote their lives to money while so many go on at subsistence or below-subsistence levels. Occasionally, at dark moments of my day, I will espy a garish object and covet it, or, I should say, my imagination will create a future or alternative world in which I and that object – however useless and expensive it may be – co-exist happily. The most obvious candidates for such daydreaming are luxury items guised as useful appurtenances: clothes, cars, televisions, kitchen appliances, linens, or other everyday, unnoticeable things that suddenly need to be as beautiful as a sonnet or painting. In some quaint corner of my mind, this object and I sit and stare at one another in mutual understanding: I own the object and the object owns me because it has brought me to value it when what I really want in life – love, friendship, passion, learning, joy – cannot be purchased, lent, stolen, or leased. But these are just moments. Moments in which the basic ease of a materialistic approach to the world becomes as clear and smooth as the diamond bevels that define its status. When I awake from these small journeys into a lesser realm, I become immediately aware of the need for something heartening, a repair of pure artistic delight that is best found on a page or screen. It is clear looking at the motives of men that only a minor percentage of us share these ideals, and that most of us are urged forth by that primordial fear of going backward. Which brings us to this rather unusual entry in a famous collection of stories.

Watson begins his tale on "a wild morning in October," when his peerless companion is found at the breakfast table in a state of "sinister cheerfulness." Connoisseurs of the Holmes tales will already remark that the eponymous sleuth rarely if ever eats in the morning unless he has been up the whole night pondering the intricacies of a case, and agree with Watson that bad weather often affects Holmes in the most dire fashion, "for, like all great artists, he was easily impressed by his surroundings." Yet Holmes is in a fabulous mood because a most bizarre case has been foisted upon him by the police force in Winchester, and it involves the American robber baron J. Neil Gibson:

This man is the greatest financial power in the world, and a man, as I understand, of most violent and formidable character. He married a wife, the victim of this tragedy, of whom I know nothing save that she was past her prime, which was the more unfortunate as a very attractive governess superintended the education of two young children. These are the three people concerned, and the scene is a grand old manor house, the centre of a historical English state.

What is remarkable about this description is its unswerving accuracy: the vast majority of domestic tragedies find their reasoning in a love triangle that is seldom equilateral. That Gibson, a cutthroat industrialist with hardly a gram of pity for the less economically evolved, would be the fulcrum of such a balance beam is not unlikely given the sway that a life of ease can have on a sequacious mind. And Gibson himself is a gunnysack of sorry clichés (a "successful man of affairs, iron of nerve, and leathery of conscience"; "a tall gaunt figure [that] had a suggestion of hunger and rapacity," reminiscent of a line in this play; a man "with a lot of firearms of one sort and another [who] .... sleeps with a loaded revolver in the drawer beside his bed"), unsurprising given his unimaginative ambition to be very rich and to make his competitors very poor. Throw in the typical Americanisms – adjectives used as adverbs, rapid speech, aggressive and colorful language – that Conan Doyle tended to inflict upon all his characters from across the pond apart from the titular heir in this sublime novella, and Gibson cannot but talk with a ferocious overfamiliarity that makes every word sound like a threat (witness the first quote at the beginning of this entry). He is the "Gold King," and bears great resemblance to the figure incused on America's smallest coin if "keyed to base uses instead of high ones." And his attentions will be divided between two women – his wife, Maria Pinto, the daughter of a government official at Manaus and "tropical by birth and tropical by nature," and that "very attractive governess," Grace Dunbar, author of the second quote, who has another end in mind for Gibson's money.

Some details of the crime that should not hint or allege anything in particular: Maria Pinto is dead, "a bullet through her brain and no weapon near her"; a gun was found in the room of Ms. Dunbar, "on the floor of her wardrobe"; and, after a bit of coaxing on our detective's part, Gibson admits that he grew enamored with Ms. Dunbar and swore to leave his wife for her if that's what it would take. Then there is the matter of that bridge:

This bridge – a single broad span of stone with balustraded sides – carries the drive over the narrowest part of a long, deep, reed-girt sheet of water. Thor Mere it is called. In the mouth of the bridge lay the dead woman. Such are the main facts.

That she "was a creature of the tropics, Brazilian by birth," is a revelation akin to one made of a female in another famous Holmes tale – and here cease, alas, the revelations. This story is also noteworthy for its casual mention of three "unsolved cases" that are brought to light in this book penned jointly by the author's son and one of the most famous mystery writers of all time. "Thor Bridge" has long been considered the best tale from Doyle's last collection of stories published shortly before his death in 1930, thanks in no small part to the detail of character and the explanation that seems, upon retrospect at least, both perfectly plausible and perfectly ingenious. Is it significant that, in this case more than in any other, Holmes becomes the moralist we always suspected he might be and reprimands Gibson with the admonition, "some of you rich men have to be taught that all the world cannot be bribed into condoning your offences"? Perhaps the corners of some men's souls do not merit close inspection.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood

A wise old Greek once said that we gaze upon what we find most repulsive because we have an inner need to learn – a statement of particular truth if we assume the human soul to be deathless. Our souls may indeed glean some reflection of light and hope from behind the cloudy sunsets that all Romantics adore; but what really propels us forth in a life that ultimately promises infirmity and decrepitude is the chance for redemption, for the restoration of all the days and nights lost to work, to illness, to bickering or internecine. In their stead we wish ourselves the chance to fill our past with the glory of living – the greatest work of art we could ever achieve. Even when the best and most breathtaking of young life has passed us by and we begin the turn through a second existence of increasing responsibility, pensiveness, and loss, we are reminded of why we were once young: never having been young means never having been immortal. Youth serves its placeholder when it extends its gaze past its greedy hands and gains a premonition of what is to come. That is why when the young perish they remain young forever both in our memory and in their own, but they will not have lived or loved as completely as those who survive to grayness. So although dying young for a starlet may lead to greater posthumous worship it is not to be desired on any soul however deserving it may be of adulation. Which brings us to one of the most famous unfinished novels of all time.

The plot involves a certain simplicity enriched only by the sensations and motives of true art. Our title character is a young man betrothed as a child by his dying father to another orphan-in-waiting, Rosa. Drood is well-spoken and temperamental like many who have had to justify their suffering, and in that way he resembles his uncle and guardian, John Jasper. Jasper is only a few years older than Drood and the cathedral choirmaster in Cloisterham, the smallish town in which our events accumulate. His position remains one of respect and clout, and his truck with all the local authorities grants him the sheen of blamelessness. Yet even a cursory glance at this "dark man" injects distrust in his vanity as if he were an alembic of maledictions:

Mr. Jasper is a dark man of some six-and-twenty, with thick, lustrous, well-arranged black hair and whisker. He looks older than he is, as dark men often do. His voice is deep and good, his face and figure are good, his manner is a little sombre. His room is a little sombre, and may have had some influence in forming his manner. It is mostly in shadow. Even when the sun shines brilliantly, it seldom touches the grand piano in the recess, or the folio music-books on the stand, or the bookshelves on the wall, or the unfinished picture of a blooming schoolgirl hanging over the chimneypiece; her flowing brown hair tied with a blue riband, and her beauty remarkable for a quite childish, almost babyish, touch of saucy discontent, comically conscious of itself (There is not the least artistic merit in this picture, which is a mere daub; but it is clear that the painter has made it humorously – one might almost say, revengefully – like the original).

We all know the type of girl depicted in such vulgarity, but our conclusions should caption the beholder not the beheld. If a cheeky, frisky young thing is your idea of a beautiful painting – or at least something worth looking at day in and day out – then the satisfaction of some primal needs will be your recurring priority. Jasper does little to conceal his fondness for Rosa, and given her attractiveness, the general dearth of eligible women in the vicinity, as well as the mild discrepancy in age (Rosa is but eighteen as the novel opens), such lust is hardly extraordinary. Jasper, Rosa, and Drood comprise the three points of an unlikely love triangle swept aside by the other characters: Sapsea, the pompous future mayor; Crisparkle, the minor canon; the Landless twins, Helena and Neville, born in Sri Lanka but of mystical origin much like certain characters in this novel; Grewgious, "the Angular man" and Rosa's benefactor who claims if forced to write a play or be decapitated, he would surely lose his head; Bazzard, his shadowy valet and closet playwright; Miss Twinkleton, the headmistress of Rosa's boarding school; and Durdles, stonemason and local drunk who also hears and knows more than most everyone else in Cloisterham. Even with this extensive cast and conversation, we never lose the thread of an argument, such as the one that Neville and Edwin have shortly before the latter's disappearance on Christmas Eve – and I will end our summary right about there.

Critics have spared no effort in decoding the novel, apparently only half-written, and arrived at the conclusion that the psyche of the criminal trumps the detective story that encases it; were it so, however, one would have serious doubts as to the validity of the whole enterprise. There is surely one overwhelming suspect and motive for the crime, but the motive vanishes once a shocking announcement (to the characters but not to the reader) dissolves a bond that many had held for eternal. The most glaring mistake of critics, and one rather endemic to academe, is to prod a hot poker among the ashes of notes that Dickens left for the continuation of the novel as well as letters dispatched to relatives and friends and try to reassemble his original intentions. There is a reason why Durdles, who is consistently inebriated yet just as consistently alert, hears a scream in or near the cemetery he patrols almost a year before Drood vanishes, and why certain characters tend to slip offstage when others appear. In fact, it is Durdles who seems to know or suspect much more than he could effectively impart:

Durdles is asleep at once, and in his sleep he dreams a dream. It is not much of a dream, considering the vast extent of the domains of dreamland, and their wonderful productions; it is only remarkable for being unusually restless, and unusually real. He dreams of lying there, asleep, and yet counting his companion's footsteps as he walks to and fro. He dreams that the footsteps die away into distance of time and of space, and that something touches him, and that something falls from his hand. Then something clinks and gropes about, and he dreams that he is alone for so long a time, that the lanes of light take new directions as the moon advances in its course. From succeeding unconsciousness he passes into a dream of slow uneasiness from cold; and painfully awakes to a perception of the lanes of light – really changed, much as he had dreamed – and Jasper walking among them, beating his hands and feet.

You might do well to consider this dream, and you might do better to omit for a moment the two characters it mentions. It is this passage that illuminates all of The Mystery of Edwin Drood in such a manner as to leave the careful reader only one decision as to the identity of the person behind our protagonist's disappearance. There is also that odd sailor, or maybe two, that drifts into Cloisterham for no apparent reason other than to visit old Crisparkle. And sailors, as we know, often detect danger from very far off.  

The Bottle Imp

If you were lucky enough to be read fantastic tales as a child and regaled on the plenitude of the world's legends and myths (a distinction made elsewhere on these pages), you will surely have heard of the genie in the lamp. You were also probably told at some point during your scholastic trials that genie and genius are from the same root, since they are indeed found interchangeably in our books. But here lies the untruth of the matter. Genius, the effervescent spirit of wisdom and creation comes from the same Greek root as genesis, or of birth and origin itself; genie has a much nastier source. The OED thus comments:

The word génie was adopted by the French translators of The Arabian Nights as the rendering of the Arabic word [more precisely given as jinn; jinni is the adjective] which it resembled in sound and sense. In English, genie has been commonly used in the singular and genii in the plural.

This split etymology, the drifting of a word already in the language to accommodate a near-homonym from a foreign tongue, is common enough in our modern age of calques and wordplay, but let us be sure: the genie of the lamps of Aladdin and other wanderers are not the protective spirits born to guard our souls. Jinn in Arabic has, as older words often do, the capacity to refer with equal authority to one word and its complete opposite – in this case angels and whatever your mind tells you that complete opposite might be. A terse introduction to this dark fable.

Although we will spend almost all of our story in the Hawaiian isles, we begin our tale in this Western city. Our protagonist Keawe is a young and impecunious man who "could read and write like a schoolmaster" but who has seen little of the world. His education and lack of exposure to other ends of the earth conspire to lead him to San Francisco, and here he is amazed by what he sees. He notices one house in particular:

This is a fine town, with a fine harbour, and rich people uncountable; and in particular, there is one hill which is covered with palaces. Upon this hill Keawe was one day taking a walk with his pocket full of money, viewing the great houses upon either hand with pleasure. "What fine houses these are!" he was thinking, "and how happy must those people be who dwell in them, and take no care for the morrow!" The thought was in his mind when he came abreast of a house that was smaller than some others, but all finished and beautified like a toy; the steps of that house shone like silver, and the borders of the garden bloomed like garlands, and the windows were bright like diamonds; and Keawe stopped and wondered at the excellence of all he saw. So stopping, he was aware of a man that looked forth upon him through a window so clear that Keawe could see him as you see a fish in a pool upon the reef. The man was elderly, with a bald head and a black beard; and his face was heavy with sorrow, and he bitterly sighed. And the truth of it is, that as Keawe looked in upon the man, and the man looked out upon Keawe, each envied the other.

Were our story merely an allegory, a couple of repartees about the inevitable unhappiness of those who chase money and wealth could end the narrative right here. Yet we are not as enmeshed in allegory as in the imagination of a warning brought out by the sweeping interest in the fate of the human soul and the choices it is allowed to make over a lifetime. Keawe enters this beautiful house and ultimately purchases for a small amount the source of the old man's prosperity, "a round-bellied bottle with a long neck." Glass in appearance and touch, it cannot be shattered; the glass itself "was white like milk, with changing rainbow colors in the grain," and inside Keawe sees "something obscurely mov[ing], like a shadow and a fire." A careful reader will note the equanimity of the spectrum beheld, as if all the colors, including white – which is all colors combined – and black – which is the absence of color – were contained, and therein were contained as well all possibilities of all things on this earth. So came the old man into the fortune Keawe sees before him, and so plans he to leave it all behind. Forces of evil will impose contracts because only they, in eternal damnation, will have the time to read every last clause. For that reason there are ground rules to the purchase of this bottle: it must be bought at a lower price than what the current owner paid for it and cannot simply be given away or abandoned; and if the owner dies still in possession of it, he will burn for all eternity in the slow flames of hell. With this in mind, Keowe has a palatial home built back in Hawaii (the money inherited from suddenly deceased relatives) and then finds Kokua, a woman beyond his wildest dreams – although his wildest dreams are not necessarily wreathed with joy and good fortune, and, by this unwilling association, neither are hers.

The vision that Stevenson imposes on his odd Hawaiian cast has much to do with his own Presbyterian upbringing and the cataclysmic consequences of greed and diabolical pacts. The main value of The Bottle Imp, apart from its remarkable concinnity of style, is the wholly unexpected dénouement to Keowe's crisis of conscience. We will not remark here that Stevenson's decision was influenced by his growing antipathy to European mores and his concomitant sympathy with the South Sea islanders among whom he died, although there is great plausibility in such an assertion. More likely, as in so often the case in art, there obtained a happy combination of his long-held tenets on the fate of the human soul and the setting which inspired him to re-imagine an old trope. There is one paragraph in this regard which is particularly magnificent:

Kokua concealed the bottle under her holoku, said farewell to the old man, and walked off along the avenue, she cared not whither. For all roads were now the same to her, and led equally to hell. Sometimes she walked, and sometimes ran; sometimes she screamed out loud in the night, and sometimes lay by the wayside in the dust and wept. All that she had heard of hell came back to her; she saw the flames blaze, and she smelt the smoke, and her flesh withered on the coals.

"All that she had heard of hell came back to her" might be the finest short description ever furnished on the subject. And the funny thing is, all of us know exactly what she means.