The History of China - #202.5 - Bonus: Strange Tales V.5: The Masque of the Red Death

Episode Date: October 23, 2020

You are invited to a very exclusive party. Everyone who's anyone will be there, dressed to the nines. You're sure to have the time of your life, and won't even know where the time's gone... Story by: Edgar Allen Poe Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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by Edgar Allan Poe Published 1842 The Red Death had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal or so hideous. Blood was its avatar and its seal. The madness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body, and especially upon the victim's face,

were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow man, and the whole seizure, progress, and termination of the disease were incidents of half an hour. But Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his crenellated abbeys. This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince's own eccentric yet august taste. A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts.

They resolved to leave means neither of ingress nor egress to the sudden impulses of despair or frenzy from within. The abbey was amply provisioned. With such precautions, the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime, it was folly to grieve or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet dancers, there were musicians, there was beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the Red Death.

It was close to the fifth or sixth month of his seclusion that the Prince Prospero entertained his thousand friends at a masked ball of the most unusual magnificence. It was a voluptuous scene, that masquerade. But first, let me tell you of the rooms in which it was held. There were seven, an imperial suite in many palaces. However, such suites form a long and straight vista, while the folding doors slide back nearly to the walls on either hand, so that the view of the whole extant is scarcely impeded. Here, the case was very different, as might have been expected from the Duke's love of the bizarre. The apartments were so irregularly disposed that the vision embraced but little more than one at a time. There was a sharp

turn at the right and left, in the middle of each wall. A tall and narrow Gothic window looked out upon a closed corridor, of which pursued the windings of the suite. These windows were of stained glass, whose color varied in accordance to the prevailing hue of the decorations of the chamber into which it opened. That at the eastern extremity was hung, for example, in blue, and vividly blue were its windows. The second chamber was purple in its ornaments and tapestries, and here the panes were purple. The third was green throughout, and so were the casements. The fourth was furnished and lighted with orange, the fifth with white, the sixth with violet.

The seventh apartment was closely shrouded in black velvet tapestries that hung all over the ceiling and down the walls, falling in heavy folds upon a carpet of the same material and hue. But in this chamber only, the color of the windows failed to correspond to the decorations. The panes were scarlet, a deep blood color. Now, in no one of any of the seven apartments was there any lamp or candelabrum amid the profusion of golden ornaments that lay scattered to and fro and depended from the roof. There was no light of any kind emanating from lamp or candle within the suite of chambers. But in the corridors that followed the suite, there stood, opposite each window, a heavy tripod,

bearing a brazier of fire, that projected its rays through the tinted glass and so glaringly lit the room, and thus were produced a multitude of gaudy and fantastic appearances. But in the western or back chamber, the effect of the firelight that streamed through the dark hangings through the blood-tinted panes was ghastly in the extreme, and produced so wild a look upon the countenances of those who entered, that there were few of the company bold enough to set foot within its precincts at all. It was within this apartment also that there stood against the western wall a gigantic clock of ebony. Its pendulum swung to and fro with a dull, heavy, monotonous clang. And when the minute hand made the circuit of the face, and the hour was to be stricken,

there came from the brazen lungs of the clock a sound which was clear and loud and deep and exceedingly musical, but of so peculiar a note and emphasis, that, at each lapse of an hour, the musicians of the orchestra were constrained to pause momentarily in their performance to hearken to the sound. And thus the waltzers perforce ceased their evolutions, and there was a brief disconcert of the whole gay company. And while the chimes of the clock yet rang, it was observed that the giddiest grew pale, and the more aged and sedate passed their hands over their brows, as if in confused reverie or meditation. But when the echoes had fully ceased, a light laughter at once pervaded the assembly. The musicians looked at each other and smiled, as if at their own nervousness and folly,

and made whispering vows, each to the other, that the next chiming of the clock should produce in them no similar emotion. And then, after the lapse of sixty minutes, which embrace three thousand and six hundred seconds of time that flies, there came yet another chiming of the clock, and then were the same disconcert and tremulousness and meditation as before. From Fort Sumter to the Battle of Gettysburg. From the Emancipation Proclamation to Appomattox Courthouse, from the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Compromise of 1877, from Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, to Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. The Civil War and Reconstruction

was a pivotal era in American history. I'm Rich and I'm Tracy and we're the hosts of a podcast that takes a deep dive into that era when a war was fought to save the Union and to free the slaves and when the work to rebuild the nation after that war was over turned into a struggle to guarantee liberty and justice for all Americans. Look for The Civil War and Reconstruction wherever you find your podcasts. But in spite of these things, it was a gay and magnificent revel. The tastes of the Duke were peculiar. He had a fine eye for color and effect. He disregarded the decorum of mere fashion. His plans were bold and fiery, and his conceptions glowed with barbaric luster. There are some who would have thought him mad. His followers felt

that he was not. It was necessary to hear and see and touch him to be sure that he was not. He had directed, in great part, the movable embellishments of the seven chambers upon occasion of this great feat, and it was his own guiding taste which had given character to the masqueraders. To be sure, they were grotesque. There were much glare and glitter and piquancy and phantasm, much of what has been seen in Hernani. There were arabesque figures with unsuited limbs and appointments. There were delirious fancies such as the madman fashions. There were much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre,

something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust. To and fro in the seven chambers stalked, in fact, a multitude of dreams. And in these dreams writhed in and about, taking hue from the rooms and causing the wild music of the orchestra to seem as the echo of their steps. And anon, there strikes the ebony clock which stands in the hall of the velvet. And then, for a moment, all is still and all is silent save the voice of the clock. The dreams are stiff-fro frozen as they stand. But the echoes of the chime die away.

They have endured but an instant, and a light half-subdued laughter floats after them as they depart. And now the music swells, and the dreams live and writhe to and fro, more merry than ever, taking hue from the many-tinted windows through which stream the rays of the tripods. But to the chamber which lies most westwardly of the seven, there are now none of the maskers who venture. For the night is waning away, and there flows a ruddier light through the blood-colored panes, and the blackness of the sable drapery appalls. And to them whose foot falls on the sable carpet,

there comes from the near clock of ebony a muffled peal, more solemnly emphatic than any which reaches their ears who indulge in the more remote gaieties of the other apartments. But these other apartments were densely crowded, and in them beat feverishly the heart of life, and the revel went whirlingly on, until at length there commenced the sound of midnight upon the clock. And then the music ceased, as I have told, and the evolutions of the waltzers were quieted,

and there was an uneasy cessation of all things as before. The music ceased, as I have told, and the evolutions of the waltzers were quieted, and there was an uneasy cessation of all things as before. But now there were twelve strokes to be sounded by the bell of the clock, and thus it happened, perhaps that more of thought crept with more of time into the meditations of the thoughtful among those who reveled. And thus too it happened that before the last echoes of the thoughtful among those who reveled. And thus too it happened, that before the last echoes of the last chime had utterly sunk into silence, there were many individuals in the crowd who had found leisure to become aware of the presence of a masked figure which

had arrested the attention of no single individual before. And the rumor of this new presence having spread itself whisperingly around, there arose at length from the whole company a buzz or murmur of horror and of disgust. In an assembly of phantasms such as I have painted, it may well be supposed that no ordinary appearance could have excited such sensation. In truth, the masquerade license of the knight was nearly unlimited, but the figure in question had out-Herodded Herod, and had gone beyond the bounds of even the prince's indefinite decorum. There are cords in the heart of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion. Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are all equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made. The whole company, indeed, seemed now deeply to feel that in the costume and bearing of the stranger, neither wit nor propriety existed. The figure was tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave. The mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse

that the closest scrutiny must have difficulty in detecting the cheat. And yet all of this might have been endured, if not approved, by the mad revelers around. But the mummer had gone so far as to assume the type of the Red Death. His vesture was dabbled in blood, and his broad brow, with all the features of his face, was besprinkled with that scarlet horror. When the eyes of Prince Prospero fell on this spectral image, which, with a slow and solemn movement, as if more fully to sustain its role, stalked to and fro among the waltzers. He was seen to be convulsed in the first moment with a strong shudder of either terror or distaste, but in the next,

his brow reddened with rage. Who dares? he demanded hoarsely of the courtiers who stood near him. Who dares insult us with this blasphemous mockery? Seize him and unmask him, that we may know whom we have to hang at sunrise from the battlements. It was in the eastern, or blue, chamber in which stood Prince Prospero as he uttered these words. They rang throughout the seven rooms loudly and clearly, for the prince was a bold and robust man, and the music had become hushed at the waving of his hand. It was in the blue room where stood the prince,

with a group of pale courtiers by his side. At first, as he spoke, there was a slight rushing movement of this group in the direction of the intruder, who, at the moment, was also near at hand, and now, with deliberate and stately step, made closer approach to the speaker. But from a certain nameless awe, with which the mad assumptions of the mummer had inspired the whole party, there were found none who put forth a hand to seize him, so that, unimpeded, he passed within a yard of the prince's person, and while the vast assembly, with one impulse, shrank from the centers of the room to the walls, he made his way,

uninterruptedly, but with the same solemn and measured step which had distinguished him from the first, through the blue chamber to the purple, to the purple to the green, to the green, to the green, to the orange, through this again to the white, and even thence to the violet, ere a decided movement had been made to arrest him. It was then, however, that the Prince Prospero, maddened with rage and the shame of his own momentary cowardice, rushed hurriedly through the six chambers,

while none followed him on account of a deadly terror that had seized upon all. He bore aloft a drawn dagger, and had approached in rapid impetuosity to within three or four feet of the retreating figure, when the latter, having attained the extremity of the velvet apartment, turned suddenly and confronted his pursuer. There was a sharp cry, and the dagger dropped, gleaming upon the sable carpet, upon which almost instantly afterward fell prostrate in death the Prince Prospero.

Then, summoning the wild courage of despair, a throng of the revelers at once threw themselves into the black apartment, and seizing the mummer, whose tall figure stood erect and motionless within the shadow of the ebony clock, gasped in unutterable horror at finding the grave cerements and corpse-like mask, which they handled with so violent a rudeness, untenanted by any tangible form. And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night, and one by one dropped the revelers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel,

and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay, and the flames of the tripods expired, and darkness and decay and the red death held illimitable dominion over all. Hi everyone, this is Scott. If you want to learn about the world's oldest civilizations, find out how they were rediscovered. Follow the story of Mark Antony and Cleopatra's descendants over ten generations, or take a deep dive into the Iron Age or the Hellenistic era,

then check out the Ancient World Podcast. Available on all podcasting platforms, or go to ancientworldpodcast.com. That's the Ancient World Podcast.