disappeared. Blindly and dumbly I stumble on with the roll; and so at
length we come into the yard of a little prison; and the divine man bowed
under my great sack.... I never thanked him. When I turned, they'd taken
him away, and the sack stood accusingly at my feet.

Through the complete disorder of my numbed mind flicker jabbings of
strange tongues. Some high boy's voice is appealing to me in Belgian,
Italian, Polish, Spanish and--beautiful English. "Hey, Jack, give me a
cigarette, Jack...."

I lift my eyes. I am standing in a tiny oblong space. A sort of court.
All around, two-story wooden barracks. Little crude staircases lead up to
doors heavily chained and immensely padlocked. More like ladders than
stairs. Curious hewn windows, smaller in proportion than the slits in a
doll's house. Are these faces behind the slits? The doors bulge
incessantly under the shock of bodies hurled against them from within.
The whole dirty _nouveau_ business about to crumble.

Glance one.

Glance two: directly before me. A wall with many bars fixed across one
minute opening. At the opening a dozen, fifteen, grins. Upon the bars
hands, scraggy and bluishly white. Through the bars stretching of lean
arms, incessant stretchings. The grins leap at the window, hands
belonging to them catch hold, arms belonging to the hands stretch in my
direction ... an instant; the new grins leap from behind and knock off
the first grins which go down with a fragile crashing like glass smashed:
hands wither and break, arms streak out of sight, sucked inward.

In the huge potpourri of misery a central figure clung, shaken but