Now, through all the vacant silence,
Reign the darkness and the damp,
Broken only when the traveller
Comes to gaze, with guide and lamp.
All about him, black and shattered,
Eaten with the rust of Time,
Lie the fearful signs and tokens
Of an age when Law was Crime.
And the guide, with grim precision,
Tells the dismal tale once more,
Tells to living men the tortures
Living men have borne before.
Well that speechless things, unconscious,
Furnish forth that place of dread,
Guiltless of the crimes they witnessed,
Guiltless of the blood they shed;
Else what direful lamentations,
And what revelations dire,
Ceaseless from their lips would echo,
Tossed in memory's penal fire.
Even as we gaze, the fancy
With a sudden life-gush warms,
And, once more, the Torture Chamber,
With its murderous tenants swarms.
Yonder, through the narrow archway,
Comes the culprit in the gloom,
Falters on the fatal threshold—
Totters to the bloody doom.
Here the executioner, lurking,
Waits, with brutal thirst, his hour,
Tool of bloodier men and bolder,
Drunken with the dregs of power.
There the careful leech sits patient,
Watching pulse, and hue, and breath,
Weighing life's remaining scruples
With the heavier chance of death.
Eking out the little remnant,
Lest the victim die too soon,
And the torture of the morning
Spare the torture of the noon.