For along the far receding narrow ways, every couch stood by itself, and on each slept a lonely sleeper.

I thought at first their sleep was death, but I soon saw it was something deeper still--a something I did not know.
The moon rose higher, and shone through other openings, but I could never see enough of the place at once to know its shape or character; now it would resemble a long cathedral nave, now a huge barn made into a dwelling of tombs.

She looked colder than any moon in the frostiest night of the world, and where she shone direct upon them, cast a bluish, icy gleam on the white sheets and the pallid countenances--but it might be the faces that made the moon so cold! Of such as I could see, all were alike in the brotherhood of death, all unlike in the character and history recorded upon them.

Here lay a man who had died--for although this was not death, I have no other name to give it--in the prime of manly strength; his dark beard seemed to flow like a liberated stream from the glacier of his frozen countenance; his forehead was smooth as polished marble; a shadow of pain lingered about his lips, but only a shadow.

On the next couch lay the form of a girl, passing lovely to behold.