"David Providence," he bleated in trembling voice, and the great
Zone questionnaire was on.

We had enrolled the group before a son of wisdom among them
surmised that we were not, after all, plain-clothes men in quest
of criminals; and his announcement brought visible relief. Twice
as many blacks were sprawled in the two rows of double-sided,
three-story bunks,--mere strips of canvas on gas-pipes that could
be hung up like swinging shelves when not in use. Mere noise did
not even disturb their dreams. We roused them by pencil-jabs in
the ribs, and they started up with savage, animal-like grunts and
murderous glares which instantly subsided to sheepish grins and
voiceless astonishment at sight of a white face bending over them.
Now and again open-mouthed guffaws of laughter greeted the mumbled
admission of some powerful buck that he could not read, or did not
know his age. But there was nothing even faintly resembling
insolence, for these were all British West Indians without a
corrupting "States nigger" among them. A half-hour after our
arrival we had tagged the barracks and dived into the next camp,
blacker and sleepier and more populous than the first. It was
February morning before I climbed the steps of silent 47 and
stepped under the shower-bath that is always preliminary, on the
Zone, to a night's repose.

A dream of earthquake, holocaust, and general destruction
developed gradually into full consciousness at four-thirty. House
47 was in riotous uproar. No, neither conflagration nor foreign
invasion was pending; it was merely the houseful of engineers in
their customary daily struggle to catch the labor-train and be
away to work by daylight. When the hour's rampage had subsided I