ABSTRACT
John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress charts the journey of the pilgrim Christian from the City of Destruction through the 'Slough of Despond' and 'the Valley of the Shadow of Death' to the Celestial City. As wetlands mix the elements, they produce an aberrant 'humour', or psychosomatic state, strictly a kind of phlegmatic melancholy. In the patriarchal Western tradition wetlands have been seen as a wilderness to be tamed, the sites of mixed elements and aberrant humours giving rise to melancholy and madness. Giant Despair is a character straight out of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress who owns 'Doubting-Castle'. The detective's journey into the urban underworld is not only physical but also moral and allegorical. In the case of Sherlock Holmes, the detective's journey also includes a descent into the Bunyanesque 'Slough of Despond' of great Grimpen Mire in The Hound of the Baskervilles.
