and sickness. It was unreal--the
whole thing unreal: those working at usual, necessary tasks as well as
those furtive, watchful ones in the burning sunlight. Death was in them
all.

I went out into the courtyard, walking slowly in the scorching heat.
There was no shade or coolness anywhere. My attention was drawn to a
pregnant woman who had evidently been sitting in a thin strip of shade
by the fence; but now the sun was beating down on her bare head. She sat
with her arms hanging along her sides, the palms of her hands turned
upwards. A baby hardly a year old twisted fretfully on her lap,
fumbling at her breast with a little red hand. But she looked steadily
over the baby's round head, a curiously intent expression in her dark
eyes, as though she were looking at something so far away that she must
concentrate all herself on it so as not to lose it from view.

Near her a man leaned against the fence. He was red-headed, and his
unkempt hair and ragged beard flamed in the sun. A rope tied round his
waist kept up his loose trousers, and his shirt was open, disclosing a
hairy chest. Where his skin showed, it was unexpectedly white. He kept
plucking at his chest, smiling idiotically.

"Is he insane?" I asked Mme. C----.

"Yes. He's that woman's husband. He went out of his head on the road.
They say he was raging that his wife was obliged to walk in her
condition. Well, he's happier than she is, now."

Under a canopy made from an old blue skirt lay a sick boy. His face was
like a death-mask already, the yellow skin stretched tightly over the
bones of his face, and his mouth unnaturally wide, with parched, swollen
lips. From his hollow eye-sockets his eyes looked out unwinking, as
though his lids had been cut off. He held himself halfway between a
reclining and an upright position. No normal person could hold himself
that way for long, but the sick boy kept himself motionless with
maniacal strength. The flies hung over him like a cloud of black
cinders. One of his friends attempted to keep them away with a leafy
branch which he had found, Heaven knows where! I could see no other sign
of green in the place. As we passed, I noticed the branch sweep back and
forth over the sick boy's face, touching the skin. And still the fixed
stare continued, uninterrupted--that blind gaze straight out into
emptiness.

At the farther end, an opening between two of the tenements led into a
garden. This space, too, was crowded with waitin