Like all Pits, North Discomfort 405 consisted of a circle of iron walls enclosing an enormous garbage pit, in the center of which was a hole from which poured exceeding hot fire. Hot coals and burning lava spat from the hole. The glare was unremitting. Only full-fledged demons like Azzie were permitted to wear sunglasses.
And the torments of the damned were accompanied and amplified by music of a sort. Menial imps had scraped clear a semicircle in the midst of the dense, matted, moldy, and rotten debris. The orchestra was seated in this semicircle on orange crates. It was composed of inept musicians who had died in the act of performing. Here in Hell they were forced to play the works of the worst composers ever known. Their names are not remembered on Earth, but in Hell, where their compositions are played without stop, and even broadcast on the Kazum circuit, they are famous.
The imps worked away, turning and adjusting the damned on their griddles. The imps, like the ghouls, liked their people well rotted, and served up marinated in an admixture of vinegar, garlic, anchovy, and maggoty sausage.
What had pulled Azzie from his repose was that in the sector directly ahead of him, the dead were stacked only about eight or ten high. Azzie gave up his comfortable (relatively) berth and scrambled down through rotting eggshells and squashy entrails and chicken heads to the level ground where he could trample comfortably over the bodies.
"When I said stack 'em high," he told the imps, "I meant a whole lot higher than that."
"But they topple over when we try to stack them any higher!" said the head imp.
"Then get some bracing material to hold them in! I want those piles at least twenty bodies high!"
"Difficult, sir."