Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

...various kinds of fruit in various stages of decay... slices of stale, smelly bread and a few pieces of dusty chocolate.

The air downstairs in the cellar was grey and foggy. It smelled of mould and the chill of graves.

Over all was that air of abandonment and decay which seems nowhere so fit and significant as in a village of the forgotten dead.

A general flavor of mild decay.

There was a moist, fertile, decaying sort of odor in the air. Florida was the sort of place that always seemed to be threatening to slip out of time and go back to the Paleozoic where it belonged. The light was a tawny gold filtered through a fragmented wall of green.

And when Hightower approaches, the smell of plump unwashed flesh and unfresh clothing — that odor of unfastidious sedentation, of static overflesh not often enough bathed — is well nigh overpowering. [...] It is the odor of goodness. Of course it would smell bad to us that are bad and sinful.

If it starts with the word “public,” it’s probably in decay.

I was devastated. I felt immense rage. The dungeons still smell after hundreds of years. There was grime on the walls and a tiny air hole at the top. When they closed the door, there was no light. Hundreds of people were kept there for three months at a time before being sent God knew where. The terror they must have felt – not knowing what was to become of them. You can imagine and you cannot possibly imagine.

Mortality smelled muddy and wet and I reeked of it.

A prison taint was on everything there. The imprisoned air, the imprisoned light, the imprisoned damps, the imprisoned men, were all deteriorated by confinement. As the captive men were faded and haggard, so the iron was rusty, the stone was slimy, the wood was rotten, the air was faint, the light was dim. Like a well, like a vault, like a tomb, the prison had no knowledge of the brightness outside; and would have kept its polluted atmosphere intact, in one of the spice islands of the Indian Ocean.

Dust had dimmed only a fraction, not enough. Decay had brushed with its rotten fingers not nearly all it should. It was an enchanted sweet, stuck in the throat of time.

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall...

Beautiful surroundings, the society of learned men, the charm of noble women, the graces of art, could not make up for the loss of those light-hearted mornings of the desert, for that wind that made one a boy again. He had noticed that this peculiar quality in the air of new countries vanished after they were tamed by man and made to bear harvests. Parts of Texas and Kansas that he had first known as open range had since been made into rich farming districts, and the air had quite lost that lightness, that dry, aromatic odour. The moisture of plowed land, the heaviness of labour and growth and grain-bearing, utterly destroyed it; one could breathe that only on the bright edges of the world, on the great grass plains or the sage-brush desert.