What is "leprosies"

Usage examples of "leprosies".

All along the cliff-wall to the bluff crowned by Scarborough Castle northward appeared those cracks and caverns which had brought me here: so I got down a slope to a rude beach, strewn with blocks of chalk, and never did I feel so paltry and short a being, bays of rock outflung about me, their bluffs encrusted at the base with crass old leprosies of barnacles and beardedness of seaweed, and, higher up, their whiteness all daubed and time-spoiled, darksome caverns yawning in the enormous withdrawals of the rock-wall.

He had seen battles, too, in his time in the world, as far afield as Acre and Ascalon and Jerusalem in the first Crusade, and witnessed deaths crueller than disease, and heathen kinder than Christians, and he knew of leprosies of the heart and ulcers of the soul worse than any of these he poulticed and lanced with his herbal medicines.

Through some strange quickening of inner life the leprosies of sin were slowly eating the thing away.

And the thing was a streaming ooze of charnel pollution, a foulness beyond the black leprosies of hell.