The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 173: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE PRINCE’S DREAM 147 piercingly in the midst of his slumber, for it seemed as if the cold and slimy contact of a tremendous snake were coming uponhim. And he writhed and struggled with horrible con- vulsions in the imaginary grasp of the sable being; and then it appeared as if he were suddenly torn away from his couch and carried with appalling rapidity through an atmosphere as black as pitch and as dense as if it were one vast mass of soot. The numbness of an awful consternation now fell upon him; his tongue was paralyzed, so that he could not give vent to the scream which he wished to send forth as the ex- pression of his agony, and through the black, palpable mist was he borne along, with hurricane speed, in the arms of the _ colossal phantom whose touch was like that of the slimy snake. On, on through the stupendous soot-mist did the terrible being bear the prince, whose mind was filled with such dire horror that no mortal pen can find words to depict it, no human language afford terms to delineate its intensity. And by degrees the conviction dawned in unto the soul of this prince that he was in the embrace of another prince, more powerful than himself, the prince of the realms of darkness. At the same time that this reflection was working its way into his mind, he became aware that the shape of the colossal being was growing every instant more and more terrible; for although the headlong journey was continued through the black darkness which was felt with the same sensation | as if the prince were being dragged through a pool of muddy water, yet was he enabled to trace all the outlines of the hideous being that held him in its infernal grasp. And he saw that instead of possessing legs and feet, the lower portion of the demon’s body elongated in the form of a tremendous. serpent, the vast mass of moving, loathsome, undulating blackness stretching away, away, to an incalculable dis- tance, and at length being lost in the sootlike gloom. And as the fiend went rushing on with the speed of the hurricane, thousands of miles a minute, that monstrous tail rolled after him in a huge sable volume, as if the darkest thunder-cloud had gathered to form his train. As the traveller through a night of pitchy obscurity catches ~ a glimpse of lights glimmering in the distance, and beholds them increasing in brightness and in number as he draws nearer and nearer, until he distinguishes a vast city splen- CORNUC OO