For everywhere she looked, everywhere she turned, was the rhythm, and as it continued to control the systole and diastole of her heart, the intake and outlet of her breath, the red miasma began to creep before her eyes again, and she was afraid that she was going to lose consciousness, and if she did that she would be completely in the power of IT.
1969, Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light, part 5, page 230:
Some of his detractors liked his departure to that of Nirriti the Black, god of darkness and corruption, who had left Heaven filled with ill will and the miasma of many a dark curse.
1969, Italo Calvino, chapter 5, in William Weaver, transl., The Castle of Crossed Destinies, published 1977, part 2:
The city he has constructed is many-faceted like a crystal, or like the Ace of Cups, pierced by the cheese grater of the skyscrapers’ windows, the pulleys of the elevators, auto-coronated by the superhighways, with lots of parking space, burrowed by the luminous anthill of the underground lines, a city whose spires dominate the clouds and whose miasmas’ dark wings are buried in the bowels of the earth so as not to dull the view of the great panes of glass and the chromed metals.
