第73章

THE PLAGUE ATHENS

'Twas such a manner of disease, 'twas such Mortal miasma in Cecropian lands Whilom reduced the plains to dead men's bones, Unpeopled the highways, drained of citizens The Athenian town.For coming from afar, Rising in lands of Aegypt, traversing Reaches of air and floating fields of foam, At last on all Pandion's folk it swooped;Whereat by troops unto disease and death Were they o'er-given.At first, they'd bear about A skull on fire with heat, and eyeballs twain Red with suffusion of blank glare.Their throats, Black on the inside, sweated oozy blood;And the walled pathway of the voice of man Was clogged with ulcers; and the very tongue, The mind's interpreter, would trickle gore, Weakened by torments, tardy, rough to touch.

Next when that Influence of bane had chocked, Down through the throat, the breast, and streamed had E'en into sullen heart of those sick folk, Then, verily, all the fences of man's life Began to topple.From the mouth the breath Would roll a noisome stink, as stink to heaven Rotting cadavers flung unburied out.

And, lo, thereafter, all the body's strength And every power of mind would languish, now In very doorway of destruction.

And anxious anguish and ululation (mixed With many a groan) companioned alway The intolerable torments.Night and day, Recurrent spasms of vomiting would rack Alway their thews and members, breaking down With sheer exhaustion men already spent.

And yet on no one's body couldst thou mark The skin with o'er-much heat to burn aglow, But rather the body unto touch of hands Would offer a warmish feeling, and thereby Show red all over, with ulcers, so to say, Inbranded, like the "sacred fires" o'erspread Along the members.The inward parts of men, In truth, would blaze unto the very bones;A flame, like flame in furnaces, would blaze Within the stomach.Nor couldst aught apply Unto their members light enough and thin For shift of aid- but coolness and a breeze Ever and ever.Some would plunge those limbs On fire with bane into the icy streams, Hurling the body naked into the waves;Many would headlong fling them deeply down The water-pits, tumbling with eager mouth Already agape.The insatiable thirst That whelmed their parched bodies, lo, would make A goodly shower seem like to scanty drops.

Respite of torment was there none.Their frames Forspent lay prone.With silent lips of fear Would Medicine mumble low, the while she saw So many a time men roll their eyeballs round, Staring wide-open, unvisited of sleep, The heralds of old death.And in those months Was given many another sign of death:

The intellect of mind by sorrow and dread Deranged, the sad brow, the countenance Fierce and delirious, the tormented ears Beset with ringings, the breath quick and short Or huge and intermittent, soaking sweat A-glisten on neck, the spittle in fine gouts Tainted with colour of crocus and so salt, The cough scarce wheezing through the rattling throat.

Aye, and the sinews in the fingered hands Were sure to contract, and sure the jointed frame To shiver, and up from feet the cold to mount Inch after inch: and toward the supreme hour At last the pinched nostrils, nose's tip A very point, eyes sunken, temples hollow, Skin cold and hard, the shuddering grimace, The pulled and puffy flesh above the brows!-O not long after would their frames lie prone In rigid death.And by about the eighth Resplendent light of sun, or at the most On the ninth flaming of his flambeau, they Would render up the life.If any then Had 'scaped the doom of that destruction, yet Him there awaited in the after days A wasting and a death from ulcers vile And black discharges of the belly, or else Through the clogged nostrils would there ooze along Much fouled blood, oft with an aching head:

Hither would stream a man's whole strength and flesh.