Knee deep creatures struggle in the bog land.
© Edward Scissortongue

A field of stiff weeds and thistles and tufted nettle-bunches. Thick among the tufts of rank stiff growth lay battered canisters and clots and coils of solid excrement. A faint marshlight struggling upwards from all the ordure through the bristling grey-green weeds. An evil smell, faint and foul as the light, curled upwards sluggishly out of the canisters and from the stale crusted dung. Creatures were in the field: one, three, six: creatures were moving in the field, hither and thither. Goatish creatures with human faces, hornybrowed, lightly bearded and grey as India-rubber.Soft language issued from their spittleless lips as they swished in slow circles round and round the field, winding hither and thither through the weeds, dragging their long tails amid the rattling canisters. They moved in slow circles, circling closer and closer to enclose, to enclose, soft language issuing from their lips, their long swishing tails besmeared with stale shite, thrusting upwards their terrific faces…
© James Joyce

Under my hand flesh of flowers.
Under my hand warm landscape.
©Doris Lessing

... Skirting the pool, she followed the path towards Rainbarrow, occasionally stumbling over twisted furze roots, tufts of rushes, or oozing lumps of fleshy fungi, which at this season lay scattered about the heath like the rotten liver and lungs of some colossal animal. The moon and stars were closed up by cloud and rain to the degree of extinction. It was a night which led the traveller's thoughts instinctively to dwell on nocturnal scenes of disaster in the chronicles of the world, on all that is terrible and dark in history and legend - the last plague of Egypt, the destruction of Sennacherib's host, the agony in Gethsemane.
©Thomas Hardy

The sky ahead was greenish with the evening and gave a green tinge to the big expanse of unrippled water. Hooded crows rose from the heather and took to slow flight casting a fugitive reflection. Ahead at the flat horizon was the dark line of the bog, and a little to the left, far off against a pinker evening, the lop-sided figure of the distant dolmen. Otherwise there was just water and sky and heather and silence.
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The warm sea wind was risen and blew over them now bringing a
salty leafy smell of the autumn. It blew over the wide greenish
surface of the salmon pool, rippling it a little, and blew on toward the solitary places of the bog. The evening air thickened about them and the heather began to glow.
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…and she did not know whether the world in which she had been living was a world of good or of evil, a world of significant suffering or a devil’s shadow-play, a mere nightmare of violence.
©Iris Murdoch