Each vied with the other in laying his claws upon him.

But the three beggars did not loose their hold and tore him from the rest, howling, "He belongs to us!" The poet's already sickly doublet yielded its last sigh in this struggle.
While traversing the horrible place, his vertigo vanished.

After taking a few steps, the sentiment of reality returned to him.

He began to become accustomed to the atmosphere of the place.

At the first moment there had arisen from his poet's head, or, simply and prosaically, from his empty stomach, a mist, a vapor, so to speak, which, spreading between objects and himself, permitted him to catch a glimpse of them only in the incoherent fog of nightmare,--in those shadows of dreams which distort every outline, agglomerating objects into unwieldy groups, dilating things into chimeras, and men into phantoms.