by Edgar Allan Poe
(1850)
DURING the dread reign of the Cholera in New
York, I had accepted the invitation of a relative to spend a
fortnight with him in the retirement of his cottage ornee on
the banks of the Hudson. We had here around us all the ordinary
means of summer amusement; and what with rambling in the woods,
sketching, boating, fishing, bathing, music, and books, we
should have passed the time pleasantly enough, but for the
fearful intelligence which reached us every morning from the
populous city. Not a day elapsed which did not bring us news of
the decease of some acquaintance. Then as the fatality
increased, we learned to expect daily the loss of some friend.
At length we trembled at the approach of every messenger. The
very air from the South seemed to us redolent with death. That
palsying thought, indeed, took entire posession of my soul. I
could neither speak, think, nor dream of any thing else. My
host was of a less excitable temperament, and, although greatly
depressed in spirits, exerted himself to sustain my own. His
richly philosophical intellect was not at any time affected by
unrealities. To the substances of terror he was sufficiently
alive, but of its shadows he had no apprehension.
His endeavors to arouse me from the condition of
abnormal gloom into which I had fallen, were frustrated, in
great measure, by certain volumes which I had found in his
library. These were of a character to force into germination
whatever seeds of hereditary superstition lay latent in my
bosom. I had been reading these books without his knowledge,
and thus he was often at a loss to account for the forcible
impressions which had been made upon my fancy.
A favorite topic with me was the popular belief in
omens- a belief which, at this one epoch of my life, I was
almost seriously disposed to defend. On this subject we had
long and animated discussions- he maintaining the utter
groundlessness of faith in such matters,- I contending that a
popular sentiment arising with absolute spontaneity- that is to
say, without apparent traces of suggestion- had in itself the
unmistakable elements of truth, and was entitled to as much
respect as that intuition which is the idiosyncrasy of the
individual man of genius.
The fact is, that soon after my arrival at the
cottage there had occurred to myself an incident so entirely
inexplicable, and which had in it so much of the portentous
character, that I might well have been excused for regarding it
as an omen. It appalled, and at the same time so confounded and
bewildered me, that many days elapsed before I could make up my
mind to communicate the circumstances to my friend.
Near the close of exceedingly warm day, I was
sitting, book in hand, at an open window, commanding, through a
long vista of the river banks, a view of a distant hill, the
face of which nearest my position had been denuded by what is
termed a land-slide, of the principal portion of its trees. My
thoughts had been long wandering from the volume before me to
the gloom and desolation of the neighboring city. Uplifting my
eyes from the page, they fell upon the naked face of the bill,
and upon an object- upon some living monster of hideous
conformation, which very rapidly made its way from the summit
to the bottom, disappearing finally in the dense forest below.
As this creature first came in sight, I doubted my own sanity-
or at least the evidence of my own eyes; and many minutes
passed before I succeeded in convincing myself that I was
neither mad nor in a dream. Yet when I described the monster
(which I distinctly saw, and calmly surveyed through the whole
period of its progress), my readers, I fear, will feel more
difficulty in being convinced of these points than even I did
myself.
Estimating the size of the creature by comparison
with the diameter of the large trees near which it passed- the
few giants of the forest which had escaped the fury of the
land-slide- I concluded it to be far larger than any ship of
the line in existence. I say ship of the line, because the
shape of the monster suggested the idea- the hull of one of our
seventy-four might convey a very tolerable conception of the
general outline. The mouth of the animal was situated at the
extremity of a proboscis some sixty or seventy feet in length,
and about as thick as the body of an ordinary elephant. Near
the root of this trunk was an immense quantity of black shaggy
hair- more than could have been supplied by the coats of a
score of buffaloes; and projecting from this hair downwardly
and laterally, sprang two gleaming tusks not unlike those of
the wild boar, but of infinitely greater dimensions. Extending
forward, parallel with the proboscis, and on each side of it,
was a gigantic staff, thirty or forty feet in length, formed
seemingly of pure crystal and in shape a perfect prism,- it
reflected in the most gorgeous manner the rays of the declining
sun. The trunk was fashioned like a wedge with the apex to the
earth. From it there were outspread two pairs of wings- each
wing nearly one hundred yards in length- one pair being placed
above the other, and all thickly covered with metal scales;
each scale apparently some ten or twelve feet in diameter. I
observed that the upper and lower tiers of wings were connected
by a strong chain. But the chief peculiarity of this horrible
thing was the representation of a Death's Head, which covered
nearly the whole surface of its breast, and which was as
accurately traced in glaring white, upon the dark ground of the
body, as if it had been there carefully designed by an artist.
While I regarded the terrific animal, and more especially the
appearance on its breast, with a feeling or horror and awe-
with a sentiment of forthcoming evil, which I found it
impossible to quell by any effort of the reason, I perceived
the huge jaws at the extremity of the proboscis suddenly expand
themselves, and from them there proceeded a sound so loud and
so expressive of wo, that it struck upon my nerves like a knell
and as the monster disappeared at the foot of the hill, I fell
at once, fainting, to the floor.
Upon recovering, my first impulse, of course, was
to inform my friend of what I had seen and heard- and I can
scarcely explain what feeling of repugnance it was which, in
the end, operated to prevent me.
At length, one evening, some three or four days
after the occurrence, we were sitting together in the room in
which I had seen the apparition- I occupying the same seat at
the same window, and he lounging on a sofa near at hand. The
association of the place and time impelled me to give him an
account of the phenomenon. He heard me to the end- at first
laughed heartily- and then lapsed into an excessively grave
demeanor, as if my insanity was a thing beyond suspicion. At
this instant I again had a distinct view of the monster- to
which, with a shout of absolute terror, I now directed his
attention. He looked eagerly- but maintained that he saw
nothing- although I designated minutely the course of the
creature, as it made its way down the naked face of the
hill.
I was now immeasurably alarmed, for I considered
the vision either as an omen of my death, or, worse, as the
fore-runner of an attack of mania. I threw myself passionately
back in my chair, and for some moments buried my face in my
hands. When I uncovered my eyes, the apparition was no longer
apparent.
My host, however, had in some degree resumed the
calmness of his demeanor, and questioned me very rigorously in
respect to the conformation of the visionary creature. When I
had fully satisfied him on this head, he sighed deeply, as if
relieved of some intolerable burden, and went on to talk, with
what I thought a cruel calmness, of various points of
speculative philosophy, which had heretofore formed subject of
discussion between us. I remember his insisting very especially
(among other things) upon the idea that the principle source of
error in all human investigations lay in the liability of the
understanding to under-rate or to over-value the importance of
an object, through mere mis-admeasurement of its propinquity.
"To estimate properly, for example," he said, "the influence to
be exercised on mankind at large by the thorough diffusion of
Democracy, the distance of the epoch at which such diffusion
may possibly be accomplished should not fail to form an item in
the estimate. Yet can you tell me one writer on the subject of
government who has ever thought this particular branch of the
subject worthy of discussion at all?"
He here paused for a moment, stepped to a
book-case, and brought forth one of the ordinary synopses of
Natural History. Requesting me then to exchange seats with him,
that he might the better distinguish the fine print of the
volume, he took my armchair at the window, and, opening the
book, resumed his discourse very much in the same tone as
before.
"But for your exceeding minuteness," he said, "in
describing the monster, I might never have had it in my power
to demonstrate to you what it was. In the first place, let me
read to you a schoolboy account of the genus Sphinx, of the
family Crepuscularia of the order Lepidoptera, of the class of
Insecta- or insects. The account runs thus:
"'Four membranous wings covered with little
colored scales of metallic appearance; mouth forming a rolled
proboscis, produced by an elongation of the jaws, upon the
sides of which are found the rudiments of mandibles and downy
palpi; the inferior wings retained to the superior by a stiff
hair; antennae in the form of an elongated club, prismatic;
abdomen pointed, The Death's- headed Sphinx has occasioned much
terror among the vulgar, at times, by the melancholy kind of
cry which it utters, and the insignia of death which it wears
upon its corslet.'"
He here closed the book and leaned forward in the
chair, placing himself accurately in the position which I had
occupied at the moment of beholding "the monster."
"Ah, here it is," he presently exclaimed- "it is
reascending the face of the hill, and a very remarkable looking
creature I admit it to be. Still, it is by no means so large or
so distant as you imagined it,- for the fact is that, as it
wriggles its way up this thread, which some spider has wrought
along the window-sash, I find it to be about the sixteenth of
an inch in its extreme length, and also about the sixteenth of
an inch distant from the pupil of my eye."