The moon rose, and he saw that desolate world as through the fumes of a yellow smoke.

With dawn he went on.
He passed through broad, low morasses out of which rose sulphurous fogs.

Mile after mile he buried himself deeper in it, and it became more and more a dead country, a lost hell.

There were berry bushes on which there grew no berries.

There were forests and swamps, but without a living creature to inhabit them.
It was a country of water in which there were no fish, of air in which there were no birds, of plants without flowers--a reeking, stinking country still with the stillness of death.