"In regard to the population; the dead cities are much more densely populated than the living; in the latter there are hardly three generations at one time, while in the former, hundreds of generations are crowded together.

As for the lights you sometimes see shining in the darkness, they are phosphorescent gleams from death, or rather they are the expiring gleams of thousands of vanished lives; they are the twilight glow of love, ambition, anger, genius, mercy; they are, in short, the last glow of a dying light, of the individuality which is disappearing, of the being yielding back his elements to mother earth.

They are the foam made by the river when it mingles its waters with those of the ocean."

- The Angel of Death