Then like an avalanche of dead ravens, sable darkness came tumbling down upon him. But there were whitish outlines in the darkness, moving and swaying, and there were rattlings and clanking sounds, and eery whistlings.
Rachitic with fear Gud's knees bent beneath him and he sank down in the blackness and shuddered in his soul.
Before him, like a great grey army marching, the skeletons of all the mortal dead, of all the worlds and all the ages that had ever been, were filing by.
In measured time they marched, their gaunt legbones swinging in great sweeping strides, their backbones bending and creaking as they marched; while the winds between the worlds whipped through empty eyes and hollow skulls and made eery whistling sounds—and all the dry bones rattled.
So the material dead, in the empty mockery of marching, passed by Gud in vain review.
And Gud sat shuddering and alone and watched them—for eons and epochs, and epochs piled on eons of unmarked time.
After all the countless and infinitely innumerable swinging, swaying, clanking, dry-boned skeletons had marched by Gud, they started around again.
Gud knew that they were going around a second time, because he saw one pass, bearing before his bleached and grinning fact the glow of a good cigar.
There could be no mistake about it, for these were the bones of the only smoker who had ever believed that tobacco was as injurious as the non-smokers said it was!
Thus made aware that the show was being repeated on him, Gud realized that even the most gruesome and ghoulish sights and sounds became commonplace with repetition; and he became bored, and his fear died within him. So he arose and walked right through the marching mass of swinging, swaying, rattling, whistling, dry-boned skeletons, and out into the sunlight of a new day where he found Fidu digging up a freshly planted lawn in search of a bone he had buried on a golf course countless eons before.