The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens

‘Ye’ve smoked as many as five since ye come in at midnight,’ the woman goes on, as she chronically complains. He looks about him, with his hand to his forehead. ‘Another?’ says this woman, in a querulous, rattling whisper. And as she blows, and shading it with her lean hand, concentrates its red spark of light, it serves in the dim morning as a lamp to show him what he sees of her. The two first are in a sleep or stupor the last is blowing at a kind of pipe, to kindle it. Lying, also dressed and also across the bed, not longwise, are a Chinaman, a Lascar, and a haggard woman. He lies, dressed, across a large unseemly bed, upon a bedstead that has indeed given way under the weight upon it. Through the ragged window–curtain, the light of early day steals in from a miserable court. He is in the meanest and closest of small rooms. Shaking from head to foot, the man whose scattered consciousness has thus fantastically pieced itself together, at length rises, supports his trembling frame upon his arms, and looks around. Stay! Is the spike so low a thing as the rusty spike on the top of a post of an old bedstead that has tumbled all awry? Some vague period of drowsy laughter must be devoted to the consideration of this possibility. Still the Cathedral Tower rises in the background, where it cannot be, and still no writhing figure is on the grim spike. Then, follow white elephants caparisoned in countless gorgeous colours, and infinite in number and attendants. Ten thousand scimitars flash in the sunlight, and thrice ten thousand dancing–girls strew flowers. It is so, for cymbals clash, and the Sultan goes by to his palace in long procession.

What is the spike that intervenes, and who has set it up? Maybe it is set up by the Sultan’s orders for the impaling of a horde of Turkish robbers, one by one. You should visit Browse Happy and update your internet browser today!Īn ancient English Cathedral Tower? How can the ancient English Cathedral tower be here! The well–known massive gray square tower of its old Cathedral? How can that be here! There is no spike of rusty iron in the air, between the eye and it, from any point of the real prospect.

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The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens