the contents, which I hastily gulped, were not even tepid. The taste was
dull, almost bitter, clinging, thick, nauseating. I felt a renewed
interest in living as soon as the deathful swallow descended to my
abdomen, very much as a suicide who changes his mind after the fatal
dose. I decided that it would be useless to vomit. I sat up. I looked
around.

The darkness was rapidly going out of the sluggish stinking air. I was
sitting on my mattress at one end of a sort of room, filled with pillars;
ecclesiastical in feeling. I already perceived it to be of enormous
length. My mattress resembled an island: all around it on the floor at
distances varying from a quarter of an inch to ten feet (which
constituted the limit of distinct vision) reposed startling identities.
There was blood in some of them. Others consisted of a rind of blueish
matter sustaining a core of yellowish froth. From behind me a chunk of
hurtling spittle joined its fellows. I decided to stand up.

At this moment, at the far end of the room, I seemed to see an
extraordinary vulture-like silhouette leap up from nowhere. It rushed a
little way in my direction crying hoarsely "_Corvee d'eau!_"--stopped,
bent down at what I perceived to be a _paillasse_ like mine, jerked what
was presumably the occupant by the feet, shook him, turned to the next,
and so on up to six. As there seemed to be innumerable _paillasses_, laid
side by side at intervals of perhaps a foot with their heads to the wall
on three sides of me, I was wondering why the vulture had stopped at six.
On each mattress a crude imitation of humanity, wrapped ear-high in its
blanket, lay and drank from a cup like mine and spat long and high into
the room. The ponderous reek of sleepy bodies undulated toward me from
three directions. I had lost sight of the vulture in a kind of insane
confusion which arose from the further end of the room. It was as if he