Читать книгу List, Ye Landsmen!. A Romance of Incident онлайн

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This ignorance it was that dyed the memorable rencounter to a complexion of darkest horror to every faculty that I could collect. While I paused, breathing very short, hearing no sound but the thunder and the pitting of the rain on the sand, and the whisper of the surf along the beach, a vivid stroke of lightning flashed up the gibbet; there was an explosion aloft; rain fell with a sudden fury, and the hail so drummed upon my hat that I lost the noise of the surf in the sound. A number of flashes followed in quick succession, and by the dazzle I beheld the gibbet and its ghastly burden as clearly as though the sun was in the sky.

The figure hung in chains; the bight of the chain passed under the fork betwixt the thighs, and a link on either hand led through an iron collar, which clasped the neck of the body, the head lolling over and looking sideways down, and the two ends of the chain met in a ring, held by a hook, secured by a nut on top of the timber projection. But what was that at the foot of the gibbet? I believed, at first, that it was a strengthening piece, a big block or pile of wood designed to join and secure the bare, black, horrible post from which the beam pointed like some frightful spirit finger, seaward, as though death’s skeleton arm held up a dead man to the storm.