chapter 17
thus week by week the prisoners of gue put up what fight they could.some, like rambert, even contrived to fancy they were still behaving as free men and had the power of choice.but actually it would have been truer to say that by this time, mid-august, the gue had swallowed up everything and everyone.no longer were there individual destinies; only a collective destiny, made of gue and the emotions shared by all.strongest of these emotions was the sense of exile and of deprivation, with all the crosscurrents of revolt and fear set up by these.that is why the narrator thinks this moment, registering the climax of the summer heat and the disease, the best for describing, on general lines and by way of illustration, the excesses of the living, burials of the dead, and the plight of parted lovers.
it was at this time that a high wind rose and blew for several days through the gue-stricken city.wind is particrly dreaded by the inhabitants of oran, since the teau on which the town is built presents no natural obstacle, and it can sweep our streets with unimpeded violence.during the months when not a drop of rain had refreshed the town, a gray crust had formed on everything, and this ked off under the wind, disintegrating into dustclouds.what with the dust and scraps of paper whirled against people’s legs, the streets grew emptier.those few who went out could be seen hurrying along, bent forward, with handkerchiefs or their hands pressed to their mouths.at nightfall, instead of the usual throng of people, each trying to prolong a day that might well be hisst, you met only small groups hastening home or to a favorite cafe.with the result that for several days when twilight came—it fell much quicker at this time of the year—the streets were almost empty, and silent but for the long-drawn stridence of the wind.a smell of brine and seaweed came from the unseen, storm-tossed sea.and in the growing darkness the almost empty town, palled in dust, swept by bitter sea-spray, and loud with the shrilling of the wind, seemed a lost ind of the damned.
hitherto the gue had found far more victims in the more thickly popted and less well-appointed outer districts than in the heart of the town.quite suddenly, however, itunched a new attack and established itself in the business center.residents used the wind of carrying infection, “broadcasting germs,” as the hotel manager put it.whatever the reason might be, people living in the central districts realized that their turn hade when each night they heard oftener and oftener the ambnces nging past, sounding the gue’s dismal, passionless tocsin under their windows.
the authorities had the idea of segregating certain particrly affected central areas and permitting only those whose services were indispensable to cross the cordon.dwellers in these districts could not help regarding these regtions as a sort of taboo specially directed at themselves, and thus they came, by contrast, to envy residents in other areas their freedom.and thetter, to cheer themselves up in despondent moments, fell to picturing the lot of those others less free than themselves.“anyhow, there are some worse off than i,” was a remark that voiced the only sce to be had in those days.
about the same time we had a recrudescence of outbreaks of fire, especially in the residential area near the west gate.it was found, after inquiry, that people who had returned from quarantine were responsible for these fires.thrown off their bnce by bereavement and anxiety, they were burning their houses under the odd delusion that they were killing off the gue in the holocaust.great difficulty was experienced in fighting these fires, whose numbers and frequency exposed whole districts to constant danger, owing to the high wind.when the attempts made by the authorities to convince these well-meaning incendiaries that the official fumigation of their houses effectively removed any risk of infection had proved unavailing, it became necessary to decree very heavy penalties for this type of arson.
這章沒有結束^.^，請點擊下一頁繼續閱讀！
and most likely it was not the prospect of mere imprisonment that deterred these unhappy people, but themon belief that a sentence of imprisonment was tantamount to a death sentence, owing to the very high mortality prevailing in the town jail.it must be admitted that there was some foundation for this belief.it seemed that, for obvious reasons, the gueunched its most virulent attacks on those who lived, by choice or by necessity, in groups: soldiers, prisoners, monks, and nuns.for though some prisoners are kept solitary, a prison forms a sort ofmunity, as is proved by the fact that in our town jail the guards died of gue in the same proportion as the prisoners.the gue was no respecter of persons and under its despotic rule everyone, from the warden down to the humblest delinquent, was under sentence and, perhaps for the first time, impartial justice reigned in the prison.
attempts made by the authorities to redress this leveling-out by some sort of hierarchy—the idea was to confer a decoration on guards who died in the exercise of their duties—came to nothing.since martialw had been dered and the guards might, from a certain angle, be regarded as on active service, they were awarded posthumously the military medal.but though the prisoners raised no protest, strong exception was taken in military circles, and it was pointed out, logically enough, that a most regrettable confusion in the public mind would certainly ensue.the civil authority conceded the point and decided that the simplest solution was to bestow on guards who died at their post a “gue medal.”even so, since as regards the first recipients of the military medal the harm had been done and there was no question of withdrawing the decoration from them, the military were still dissatisfied.moreover, the gue medal had the disadvantage of having far less moral effect than that attaching to a military award, since in time of pestilence a decoration of this sort is too easily acquired.thus nobody was satisfied.
這章沒有結束^.^，請點擊下一頁繼續閱讀！
another difficulty was that the jail administration could not follow the procedure adopted by the religious and, in a less degree, the military authorities.the monks in the two monasteries of the town had been evacuated and lodged for the time being with religious-minded families.in the same way, whenever possible, small bodies of men had been moved out of barracks and billeted in schools or public buildings.thus the disease, which apparently had forced on us the solidarity of a beleaguered town, disrupted at the same time long-establishedmunities and sent men out to live, as individuals, in rtive istion.this, too, added to the general feeling of unrest.
indeed, it can easily be imagined that these changes,bined with the high wind, also had an incendiary effect on certain minds.there were frequent attacks on the gates of the town, and the men who made them now were armed.shots were exchanged, there were casualties, and some few got away.then the sentry posts were reinforced, and such attempts quickly ceased.none the less, they sufficed to start a wave of revolutionary violence, though only on a small scale.houses that had been burnt or closed by the sanitary control were looted.however, it seemed unlikely that these excesses were premeditated.usually it was some chance incentive that led normally well-behaved people to acts which promptly had their imitators.thus you sometimes saw a man, acting on some crazy impulse, dash into a zing house under the eyes of its owner, who was standing by, dazed with grief, watching the mes.seeing his indifference, many of the onlookers would follow the lead given by the first man, and presently the dark street was full of running men, changed to hunched, misshapen gnomes by the flickering glow from the dying mes and the ornaments or furniture they carried on their shoulders.it was incidents of this sort thatpelled the authorities to dere martialw and enforce the regtions deriving from it.
two looters were shot, but we may doubt if this made much impression on the others; with so many deaths taking ce every day, these two executions went unheeded—a mere drop in the ocean.actually scenes of this kind continued to take ce fairly often, without the authorities’ making even a show of intervening.the only regtion that seemed to have some effect on the popce was the establishment of a curfew hour.from eleven onwards, plunged inplete darkness, oran seemed a huge necropolis.
on moonlight nights the long, straight streets and dirty white walls, nowhere darkened by the shadow of a tree, their peace untroubled by footsteps or a dog’s bark, glimmered in pale recession.the silent city was no more than an assemge of huge, inert cubes, between which only the mute effigies of great men, carapaced in bronze, with their nk stone or metal faces, conjured up a sorry semnce of what the man had been.in lifeless squares and avenues these tawdry idols lorded it under the lowering sky; stolid monsters that might have personified the rule of immobility imposed on us, or, anyhow, its final aspect, that of a defunct city in which gue, stone, and darkness had effectively silenced every voice.
but there was darkness also in men’s hearts, and the true facts were as little calcted to reassure our townsfolk as the wild stories going round about the burials.the narrator cannot help talking about these burials, and a word of excuse is here in ce.for he is well aware of the reproach that might be made him in this respect; his justification is that funerals were taking ce throughout this period and, in a way, he waspelled, as indeed everybody waspelled, to give heed to them.in any case it should not be assumed that he has a morbid taste for such ceremonies; quite the contrary, he much prefers the society of the living and—to give a concrete illustration—sea-bathing.but the bathing-beaches were out of bounds and thepany of the living ran a risk, increasing as the days went by, of being perforce converted into thepany of the dead.that was, indeed, self-evident.true, one could always refuse to face this disagreeable fact, shut one’s eyes to it, or thrust it out of mind, but there is a terrible cogency in the self-evident; ultimately it breaks down all defenses.
這章沒有結束^.^，請點擊下一頁繼續閱讀！
how, for instance, continue to ignore the funerals on the day when somebody you loved needed one?actually the most striking feature of our funerals was their speed.formalities had been whittled down, and, generally speaking, all borate ceremonial suppressed.the gue victim died away from his family and the customary vigil beside the dead body was forbidden, with the result that a person dying in the evening spent the night alone, and those who died in the daytime were promptly buried.needless to say, the family was notified, but in most cases, since the deceased had lived with them, its members were in quarantine and thus immobilized.when, however, the deceased had not lived with his family, they were asked to attend at a fixed time; after, that is to say, the body had been washed and put in the coffin and when the journey to the cemetery was about to begin.
let us suppose that these formalities were taking ce at the auxiliary hospital of which dr. rieux was in charge.this converted school had an exit at the back of the main building.arge storeroom giving on the corridor contained the coffins.on arrival, the family found a coffin already nailed up in the corridor.then came the most important part of the business: the signing of official forms by the head of the family.next the coffin was loaded on a motor-vehicle-a real hearse or arge converted ambnce.the mourners stepped into one of the few taxis still allowed to ply and the vehicles drove hell-for-leather to the cemetery by a route avoiding the center of the town.
there was a halt at the gate, where police officers applied a rubber stamp to the official exit permit, without which it was impossible for our citizens to have what they called ast restingce.the policeman stood back and the cars drew up near a plot of ground where a number of graves stood open, waiting for inmates.a priest came to meet the mourners, since church services at funerals were now prohibited.to an apaniment of prayers the coffin was dragged from the hearse, roped up, and carried to the graveside; the ropes were slipped and it came heavily to rest at the bottom of the grave.no sooner had the priest begun to sprinkle holy water than the first sod rebounded from the lid.the ambnce had already left and was being sprayed with disinfectant, and while spadefuls of y thudded more and more dully on the risingyer of earth, the family were bundling into the taxi.a quarter of an hourter they were back at home.
小主，這個章節後麵還有哦^.^，請點擊下一頁繼續閱讀，後麵更精彩！
the whole process was put through with the maximum of speed and the minimum of risk.it cannot be denied that, anyhow in the early days, the natural feelings of the family were somewhat outraged by these lightning funerals.but obviously in time of gue such sentiments can’t be taken into ount, and all was sacrificed to efficiency.and though, to start with, the morale of the poption was shaken by this summary procedure—for the desire to have a “proper funeral” is more widespread than is generally believed—as time went on, fortunately enough, the food problem became more urgent and the thoughts of our townsfolk were diverted to more instant needs.so much energy was expended on filling up forms, hunting round for supplies, and lining up that people had no time to think of the manner in which others were dying around them and they themselves would die one day.thus the growingplications of our everyday life, which might have been an affliction, proved to be a blessing in disguise.indeed, had not the epidemic, as already mentioned, spread its ravages, all would have been for the best.
for then coffins became scarcer; also there was a shortage of winding-sheets, and of space in the cemetery.something had to be done about this, and one obvious step, justified by its practical convenience, was tobine funerals and, when necessary, multiply the trips between the hospital and the burial-ce.at one moment the stock of coffins in rieux’s hospital was reduced to five.once filled, all five were loaded together in the ambnce.at the cemetery they were emptied out and the iron-gray corpses put on stretchers and deposited in a shed reserved for that purpose, to wait their turn.meanwhile the empty coffins, after being sprayed with antiseptic fluid, were rushed back to the hospital, and the process was repeated as often as necessary.this system worked excellently and won the approval of the prefect.he even told rieux that it was really a great improvement on the death-carts driven by negroes of which one reads in ounts of former visitations of this sort.
小主，這個章節後麵還有哦^.^，請點擊下一頁繼續閱讀，後麵更精彩！
“yes,” rieux said.“and though the burials are much the same, we keep careful records of them.that, you will agree, is progress.”
sessful, however, as the system proved itself in practice, there was something so distasteful in thest rites as now performed that the prefect felt constrained to forbid rtions of the deceased being present at the actual interment.they were allowed toe only as far as the cemetery gates, and even that was not authorized officially.for things had somewhat changed as regards thest stage of the ceremony.in a patch of open ground dotted with lentiscus trees at the far end of the cemetery, two big pits had been dug.one was reserved for the men, the other for the women.thus, in this respect, the authorities still gave thought to propriety and it was onlyter that, by the force of things, thisst remnant of decorum went by the board, and men and women were flung into the death-pits indiscriminately.happily, this ultimate indignity synchronized with the gue’sst ravages.
in the period we are now concerned with, the separation of the sexes was still in force and the authorities set great store by it.at the bottom of each pit a deepyer of quicklime steamed and seethed.on the lips of the pit a low ridge of quicklime threw up bubbles that burst in the air above it.when the ambnce had finished its trips, the stretchers were carried to the pits in indian file.the naked, somewhat contorted bodies were slid off into the pit almost side by side, then covered with ayer of quicklime and another of earth, thetter only a few inches deep, so as to leave space for subsequent consignments.on the following day the next of kin were asked to sign the register of burials, which showed the distinction that can be made between men and, for example, dogs; men’s deaths are checked and entered up.
這章沒有結束^.^，請點擊下一頁繼續閱讀！
obviously all these activities called for a considerable staff, and rieux was often on the brink of a shortage.many of the gravediggers, stretcher-bearers, and the like, public servants to begin with, andter volunteers, died of gue.however stringent the precautions, sooner orter contagion did its work.still, when all is said and done, the really amazing thing is that, so long as the epidemicsted, there was never anyck of men for these duties.the critical moment came just before the outbreak touched high-water mark, and the doctor had good reason for feeling anxious.there was then a real shortage of man-power both for the higher posts and for the rough work, as rieux called it.but, paradoxically enough, once the whole town was in the grip of the disease, its very prevalence tended to make things easier, since the disorganization of the town’s economic life threw a great number of persons out of work.few of the workers thus made avable were qualified for administrative posts, but the recruiting of men for the “rough work” became much easier.from now on, indeed, poverty showed itself a stronger stimulus than fear, especially as, owing to its risks, such work was highly paid.
the sanitary authorities always had a waiting-list of applicants for work; whenever there was a vacancy the men at the top of the list were notified, and unless they too hadid off work for good, they never failed to appear when summoned.thus the prefect, who had always been reluctant to employ the prisoners in the jail, whether short-term men or lifers, was able to avoid recourse to this distasteful measure.as long, he said, as there were unemployed, we could afford to wait.
thus until the end of august our fellow citizens could be conveyed to theirst resting-ce, if not under very decorous conditions, at least in a manner orderly enough for the authorities to feel that they were doing their duty by the dead and the bereaved.however, we may here anticipate a little and describe the pass to which we came in the final phase.from august onwards the gue mortality was and continued such as far to exceed the capacity of our small cemetery.such expedients as knocking down walls and letting the dead encroach on neighboringnd proved inadequate; some new method had to be evolved without dy.the first step taken was to bury the dead by night, which obviously permitted a more summary procedure.the bodies were piled into ambnces inrger andrger numbers.and the few bted wayfarers who, in defiance of the regtions, were abroad in the outlying districts after curfew hour, or whose duties took them there, often saw the long white ambnces hurtling past, making the nightbound streets reverberate with the dull ngor of their bells.
這章沒有結束^.^，請點擊下一頁繼續閱讀！
thus week by week the prisoners of gue put up what fight they could.some, like rambert, even contrived to fancy they were still behaving as free men and had the power of choice.but actually it would have been truer to say that by this time, mid-august, the gue had swallowed up everything and everyone.no longer were there individual destinies; only a collective destiny, made of gue and the emotions shared by all.strongest of these emotions was the sense of exile and of deprivation, with all the crosscurrents of revolt and fear set up by these.that is why the narrator thinks this moment, registering the climax of the summer heat and the disease, the best for describing, on general lines and by way of illustration, the excesses of the living, burials of the dead, and the plight of parted lovers.
it was at this time that a high wind rose and blew for several days through the gue-stricken city.wind is particrly dreaded by the inhabitants of oran, since the teau on which the town is built presents no natural obstacle, and it can sweep our streets with unimpeded violence.during the months when not a drop of rain had refreshed the town, a gray crust had formed on everything, and this ked off under the wind, disintegrating into dustclouds.what with the dust and scraps of paper whirled against people’s legs, the streets grew emptier.those few who went out could be seen hurrying along, bent forward, with handkerchiefs or their hands pressed to their mouths.at nightfall, instead of the usual throng of people, each trying to prolong a day that might well be hisst, you met only small groups hastening home or to a favorite cafe.with the result that for several days when twilight came—it fell much quicker at this time of the year—the streets were almost empty, and silent but for the long-drawn stridence of the wind.a smell of brine and seaweed came from the unseen, storm-tossed sea.and in the growing darkness the almost empty town, palled in dust, swept by bitter sea-spray, and loud with the shrilling of the wind, seemed a lost ind of the damned.
hitherto the gue had found far more victims in the more thickly popted and less well-appointed outer districts than in the heart of the town.quite suddenly, however, itunched a new attack and established itself in the business center.residents used the wind of carrying infection, “broadcasting germs,” as the hotel manager put it.whatever the reason might be, people living in the central districts realized that their turn hade when each night they heard oftener and oftener the ambnces nging past, sounding the gue’s dismal, passionless tocsin under their windows.
the authorities had the idea of segregating certain particrly affected central areas and permitting only those whose services were indispensable to cross the cordon.dwellers in these districts could not help regarding these regtions as a sort of taboo specially directed at themselves, and thus they came, by contrast, to envy residents in other areas their freedom.and thetter, to cheer themselves up in despondent moments, fell to picturing the lot of those others less free than themselves.“anyhow, there are some worse off than i,” was a remark that voiced the only sce to be had in those days.
about the same time we had a recrudescence of outbreaks of fire, especially in the residential area near the west gate.it was found, after inquiry, that people who had returned from quarantine were responsible for these fires.thrown off their bnce by bereavement and anxiety, they were burning their houses under the odd delusion that they were killing off the gue in the holocaust.great difficulty was experienced in fighting these fires, whose numbers and frequency exposed whole districts to constant danger, owing to the high wind.when the attempts made by the authorities to convince these well-meaning incendiaries that the official fumigation of their houses effectively removed any risk of infection had proved unavailing, it became necessary to decree very heavy penalties for this type of arson.
這章沒有結束^.^，請點擊下一頁繼續閱讀！
and most likely it was not the prospect of mere imprisonment that deterred these unhappy people, but themon belief that a sentence of imprisonment was tantamount to a death sentence, owing to the very high mortality prevailing in the town jail.it must be admitted that there was some foundation for this belief.it seemed that, for obvious reasons, the gueunched its most virulent attacks on those who lived, by choice or by necessity, in groups: soldiers, prisoners, monks, and nuns.for though some prisoners are kept solitary, a prison forms a sort ofmunity, as is proved by the fact that in our town jail the guards died of gue in the same proportion as the prisoners.the gue was no respecter of persons and under its despotic rule everyone, from the warden down to the humblest delinquent, was under sentence and, perhaps for the first time, impartial justice reigned in the prison.
attempts made by the authorities to redress this leveling-out by some sort of hierarchy—the idea was to confer a decoration on guards who died in the exercise of their duties—came to nothing.since martialw had been dered and the guards might, from a certain angle, be regarded as on active service, they were awarded posthumously the military medal.but though the prisoners raised no protest, strong exception was taken in military circles, and it was pointed out, logically enough, that a most regrettable confusion in the public mind would certainly ensue.the civil authority conceded the point and decided that the simplest solution was to bestow on guards who died at their post a “gue medal.”even so, since as regards the first recipients of the military medal the harm had been done and there was no question of withdrawing the decoration from them, the military were still dissatisfied.moreover, the gue medal had the disadvantage of having far less moral effect than that attaching to a military award, since in time of pestilence a decoration of this sort is too easily acquired.thus nobody was satisfied.
這章沒有結束^.^，請點擊下一頁繼續閱讀！
another difficulty was that the jail administration could not follow the procedure adopted by the religious and, in a less degree, the military authorities.the monks in the two monasteries of the town had been evacuated and lodged for the time being with religious-minded families.in the same way, whenever possible, small bodies of men had been moved out of barracks and billeted in schools or public buildings.thus the disease, which apparently had forced on us the solidarity of a beleaguered town, disrupted at the same time long-establishedmunities and sent men out to live, as individuals, in rtive istion.this, too, added to the general feeling of unrest.
indeed, it can easily be imagined that these changes,bined with the high wind, also had an incendiary effect on certain minds.there were frequent attacks on the gates of the town, and the men who made them now were armed.shots were exchanged, there were casualties, and some few got away.then the sentry posts were reinforced, and such attempts quickly ceased.none the less, they sufficed to start a wave of revolutionary violence, though only on a small scale.houses that had been burnt or closed by the sanitary control were looted.however, it seemed unlikely that these excesses were premeditated.usually it was some chance incentive that led normally well-behaved people to acts which promptly had their imitators.thus you sometimes saw a man, acting on some crazy impulse, dash into a zing house under the eyes of its owner, who was standing by, dazed with grief, watching the mes.seeing his indifference, many of the onlookers would follow the lead given by the first man, and presently the dark street was full of running men, changed to hunched, misshapen gnomes by the flickering glow from the dying mes and the ornaments or furniture they carried on their shoulders.it was incidents of this sort thatpelled the authorities to dere martialw and enforce the regtions deriving from it.
two looters were shot, but we may doubt if this made much impression on the others; with so many deaths taking ce every day, these two executions went unheeded—a mere drop in the ocean.actually scenes of this kind continued to take ce fairly often, without the authorities’ making even a show of intervening.the only regtion that seemed to have some effect on the popce was the establishment of a curfew hour.from eleven onwards, plunged inplete darkness, oran seemed a huge necropolis.
on moonlight nights the long, straight streets and dirty white walls, nowhere darkened by the shadow of a tree, their peace untroubled by footsteps or a dog’s bark, glimmered in pale recession.the silent city was no more than an assemge of huge, inert cubes, between which only the mute effigies of great men, carapaced in bronze, with their nk stone or metal faces, conjured up a sorry semnce of what the man had been.in lifeless squares and avenues these tawdry idols lorded it under the lowering sky; stolid monsters that might have personified the rule of immobility imposed on us, or, anyhow, its final aspect, that of a defunct city in which gue, stone, and darkness had effectively silenced every voice.
but there was darkness also in men’s hearts, and the true facts were as little calcted to reassure our townsfolk as the wild stories going round about the burials.the narrator cannot help talking about these burials, and a word of excuse is here in ce.for he is well aware of the reproach that might be made him in this respect; his justification is that funerals were taking ce throughout this period and, in a way, he waspelled, as indeed everybody waspelled, to give heed to them.in any case it should not be assumed that he has a morbid taste for such ceremonies; quite the contrary, he much prefers the society of the living and—to give a concrete illustration—sea-bathing.but the bathing-beaches were out of bounds and thepany of the living ran a risk, increasing as the days went by, of being perforce converted into thepany of the dead.that was, indeed, self-evident.true, one could always refuse to face this disagreeable fact, shut one’s eyes to it, or thrust it out of mind, but there is a terrible cogency in the self-evident; ultimately it breaks down all defenses.
這章沒有結束^.^，請點擊下一頁繼續閱讀！
how, for instance, continue to ignore the funerals on the day when somebody you loved needed one?actually the most striking feature of our funerals was their speed.formalities had been whittled down, and, generally speaking, all borate ceremonial suppressed.the gue victim died away from his family and the customary vigil beside the dead body was forbidden, with the result that a person dying in the evening spent the night alone, and those who died in the daytime were promptly buried.needless to say, the family was notified, but in most cases, since the deceased had lived with them, its members were in quarantine and thus immobilized.when, however, the deceased had not lived with his family, they were asked to attend at a fixed time; after, that is to say, the body had been washed and put in the coffin and when the journey to the cemetery was about to begin.
let us suppose that these formalities were taking ce at the auxiliary hospital of which dr. rieux was in charge.this converted school had an exit at the back of the main building.arge storeroom giving on the corridor contained the coffins.on arrival, the family found a coffin already nailed up in the corridor.then came the most important part of the business: the signing of official forms by the head of the family.next the coffin was loaded on a motor-vehicle-a real hearse or arge converted ambnce.the mourners stepped into one of the few taxis still allowed to ply and the vehicles drove hell-for-leather to the cemetery by a route avoiding the center of the town.
there was a halt at the gate, where police officers applied a rubber stamp to the official exit permit, without which it was impossible for our citizens to have what they called ast restingce.the policeman stood back and the cars drew up near a plot of ground where a number of graves stood open, waiting for inmates.a priest came to meet the mourners, since church services at funerals were now prohibited.to an apaniment of prayers the coffin was dragged from the hearse, roped up, and carried to the graveside; the ropes were slipped and it came heavily to rest at the bottom of the grave.no sooner had the priest begun to sprinkle holy water than the first sod rebounded from the lid.the ambnce had already left and was being sprayed with disinfectant, and while spadefuls of y thudded more and more dully on the risingyer of earth, the family were bundling into the taxi.a quarter of an hourter they were back at home.
小主，這個章節後麵還有哦^.^，請點擊下一頁繼續閱讀，後麵更精彩！
the whole process was put through with the maximum of speed and the minimum of risk.it cannot be denied that, anyhow in the early days, the natural feelings of the family were somewhat outraged by these lightning funerals.but obviously in time of gue such sentiments can’t be taken into ount, and all was sacrificed to efficiency.and though, to start with, the morale of the poption was shaken by this summary procedure—for the desire to have a “proper funeral” is more widespread than is generally believed—as time went on, fortunately enough, the food problem became more urgent and the thoughts of our townsfolk were diverted to more instant needs.so much energy was expended on filling up forms, hunting round for supplies, and lining up that people had no time to think of the manner in which others were dying around them and they themselves would die one day.thus the growingplications of our everyday life, which might have been an affliction, proved to be a blessing in disguise.indeed, had not the epidemic, as already mentioned, spread its ravages, all would have been for the best.
for then coffins became scarcer; also there was a shortage of winding-sheets, and of space in the cemetery.something had to be done about this, and one obvious step, justified by its practical convenience, was tobine funerals and, when necessary, multiply the trips between the hospital and the burial-ce.at one moment the stock of coffins in rieux’s hospital was reduced to five.once filled, all five were loaded together in the ambnce.at the cemetery they were emptied out and the iron-gray corpses put on stretchers and deposited in a shed reserved for that purpose, to wait their turn.meanwhile the empty coffins, after being sprayed with antiseptic fluid, were rushed back to the hospital, and the process was repeated as often as necessary.this system worked excellently and won the approval of the prefect.he even told rieux that it was really a great improvement on the death-carts driven by negroes of which one reads in ounts of former visitations of this sort.
小主，這個章節後麵還有哦^.^，請點擊下一頁繼續閱讀，後麵更精彩！
“yes,” rieux said.“and though the burials are much the same, we keep careful records of them.that, you will agree, is progress.”
sessful, however, as the system proved itself in practice, there was something so distasteful in thest rites as now performed that the prefect felt constrained to forbid rtions of the deceased being present at the actual interment.they were allowed toe only as far as the cemetery gates, and even that was not authorized officially.for things had somewhat changed as regards thest stage of the ceremony.in a patch of open ground dotted with lentiscus trees at the far end of the cemetery, two big pits had been dug.one was reserved for the men, the other for the women.thus, in this respect, the authorities still gave thought to propriety and it was onlyter that, by the force of things, thisst remnant of decorum went by the board, and men and women were flung into the death-pits indiscriminately.happily, this ultimate indignity synchronized with the gue’sst ravages.
in the period we are now concerned with, the separation of the sexes was still in force and the authorities set great store by it.at the bottom of each pit a deepyer of quicklime steamed and seethed.on the lips of the pit a low ridge of quicklime threw up bubbles that burst in the air above it.when the ambnce had finished its trips, the stretchers were carried to the pits in indian file.the naked, somewhat contorted bodies were slid off into the pit almost side by side, then covered with ayer of quicklime and another of earth, thetter only a few inches deep, so as to leave space for subsequent consignments.on the following day the next of kin were asked to sign the register of burials, which showed the distinction that can be made between men and, for example, dogs; men’s deaths are checked and entered up.
這章沒有結束^.^，請點擊下一頁繼續閱讀！
obviously all these activities called for a considerable staff, and rieux was often on the brink of a shortage.many of the gravediggers, stretcher-bearers, and the like, public servants to begin with, andter volunteers, died of gue.however stringent the precautions, sooner orter contagion did its work.still, when all is said and done, the really amazing thing is that, so long as the epidemicsted, there was never anyck of men for these duties.the critical moment came just before the outbreak touched high-water mark, and the doctor had good reason for feeling anxious.there was then a real shortage of man-power both for the higher posts and for the rough work, as rieux called it.but, paradoxically enough, once the whole town was in the grip of the disease, its very prevalence tended to make things easier, since the disorganization of the town’s economic life threw a great number of persons out of work.few of the workers thus made avable were qualified for administrative posts, but the recruiting of men for the “rough work” became much easier.from now on, indeed, poverty showed itself a stronger stimulus than fear, especially as, owing to its risks, such work was highly paid.
the sanitary authorities always had a waiting-list of applicants for work; whenever there was a vacancy the men at the top of the list were notified, and unless they too hadid off work for good, they never failed to appear when summoned.thus the prefect, who had always been reluctant to employ the prisoners in the jail, whether short-term men or lifers, was able to avoid recourse to this distasteful measure.as long, he said, as there were unemployed, we could afford to wait.
thus until the end of august our fellow citizens could be conveyed to theirst resting-ce, if not under very decorous conditions, at least in a manner orderly enough for the authorities to feel that they were doing their duty by the dead and the bereaved.however, we may here anticipate a little and describe the pass to which we came in the final phase.from august onwards the gue mortality was and continued such as far to exceed the capacity of our small cemetery.such expedients as knocking down walls and letting the dead encroach on neighboringnd proved inadequate; some new method had to be evolved without dy.the first step taken was to bury the dead by night, which obviously permitted a more summary procedure.the bodies were piled into ambnces inrger andrger numbers.and the few bted wayfarers who, in defiance of the regtions, were abroad in the outlying districts after curfew hour, or whose duties took them there, often saw the long white ambnces hurtling past, making the nightbound streets reverberate with the dull ngor of their bells.
這章沒有結束^.^，請點擊下一頁繼續閱讀！