Owing to the inviolate darkness and his small acquaintance with the way, he was obliged to feel carefully with his foot each step before advancing.
He gained the first landing. The darkness was so complete, it pressed with weight upon his eyeballs, and thickened the air in his lungs. He had already begun to breathe heavily, and he paused for breath. Only about a sixth of his upward way had been accomplished, and yet he felt fatigued. The stifling sultry air of the tower made him languid and drowsy.
The sooner this was done, the better.
He recommenced the ascent.
On reaching the next landing, that of the second-floor room, he paused again.
His breathing had by this time become more laboured, and he felt as if his chest would burst. No fresh air had entered that loathsome place for years. In winter the walls wept, the paper hung off, and fungus covered the walls and the woodwork.
In summer the walls dried up, and from the dead fungi rose the stifling vapours exhaled when decay feeds on decay. These odious vapours enriched the walls with new growing powers, and so the process went on. The tower rotted inwardly. Damp came first, and later mildew, and then fungus. The fungus lived its life and finally fell to pieces, yielding inodorous fibre and mephitic spirit. The spirit fed the later growth of fungus.
Here nitre clung in crystals to the walls, and there were incomplete stalagmites under the stone window-sills.
Huge spiders wove gigantic nets from balustrade to wall, from roof to wall, from window-sash to floor. But no flies ever came to these webs, and the spiders spread needless snares, and lived at ease on lesser game.
In summer all the dust upon the floor moved continually with worm and maggot of extraordinary size, and obscene ugliness of form and colour. Neither beetle nor cockroach, earwig nor cricket, found a home here. Nothing moved swiftly, not even the spider, for he found food without pursuit or strife. Here was no contention among individuals. As in all earliest forms of life, nearly everything was done for the individual by heat and moisture. The unseemly inside of that tower was fretting and rotting slowly away, being slowly devoured by the worm and the maggot and the fungus.