Ch. 11: The City of Dreadful Night

The dense wet heat that hung over the face of land, like a blanket,
prevented all hope of sleep in the first instance. The cicalas helped
the heat; and the yelling jackals the cicalas. It was impossible to sit
still in the dark, empty, echoing house and watch the punkah beat the
dead air. So, at ten o'clock of the night, I set my walking-stick on end
in the middle of the garden, and waited to see how it would fall. It
pointed directly down the moonlit road that leads to the City of
Dreadful Night. The sound of its fall disturbed a hare. She limped from
her form and ran across to a disused Mahomedan burial-ground, where the
jawless skulls and rough-butted shank-bones, heartlessly exposed by the
July rains, glimmered like mother o' pearl on the rain-channelled soil.
The heated air and the heavy earth had driven the very dead upward for
coolness' sake. The hare limped on; snuffed curiously at a fragment of a
smoke-stained lamp-shard, and died out, in the shadow of a clump of
tamarisk trees.

The mat-weaver's hut under the lee of the Hindu temple was full of
sleeping men who lay like sheeted corpses. Overhead blazed the unwinking
eye of the Moon. Darkness gives at least a false impression of coolness.
It was hard not to believe that the flood of light from above was warm.
Not so hot as the Sun, but still sickly warm, and heating the heavy air
beyond what was our due. Straight as a bar of polished steel ran the
road to the City of Dreadful Night; and on either side of the road lay
corpses disposed on beds in fantastic attitudes--one hundred and seventy
bodies of men. Some shrouded all in white with bound-up mouths; some
naked and black as ebony in the strong light; and one--that lay face
upwards with dropped jaw, far away from the others--silvery white and
ashen gray.

'A leper asleep; and the remainder wearied coolies, servants, small
shopkeepers, and drivers from the hackstand hard by. The scene--a main
approach to Lahore city, and the night a warm one in August.' This was
all that there was to be seen; but by no means all that one could see.
The witchery of the moonlight was everywhere; and the world was horribly
changed. The long line of the naked dead, flanked by the rigid silver
statue, was not pleasant to look upon. It was made up of men alone. Were
the womenkind, then, forced to sleep in the shelter of the stifling mud-
huts as best they might? The fretful wail of a child from a low mud-roof
answered the question. Where the children are the mothers must be also
to look after them. They need care on these sweltering nights. A black
little bullet-head peeped over the coping, and a thin--a painfully thin--
brown leg was slid over on to the gutter pipe. There was a sharp clink
of glass bracelets; a