without shade, drooped beneath the stare of earth and sky. So did
the horses with drowsy bells, in long files of carts, creeping
slowly towards the interior; so did their recumbent drivers, when
they were awake, which rarely happened; so did the exhausted
labourers in the fields. Everything that lived or grew, was
oppressed by the glare; except the lizard, passing swiftly over
rough stone walls, and the cicala, chirping his dry hot chirp, like
a rattle. The very dust was scorched brown, and something quivered
in the atmosphere as if the air itself were panting.

Blinds, shutters, curtains, awnings, were all closed and drawn to
keep out the stare. Grant it but a chink or keyhole, and it shot
in like a white-hot arrow. The churches were the freest from it.
To come out of the twilight of pillars and arches--dreamily dotted
with winking lamps, dreamily peopled with ugly old shadows piously
dozing, spitting, and begging--was to plunge into a fiery river,
and swim for life to the nearest strip of shade. So, with people
lounging and lying wherever shade was, with but little hum of
tongues or barking of dogs, with occasional jangling of discordant
church bells and rattling of vicious drums, Marseilles, a fact to
be strongly smelt and tasted, lay broiling in the sun one day.
In Marseilles that day there was a villainous prison. In one of
its chambers, so repulsive a place that even the obtrusive stare
blinked at it, and left it to such refuse of reflected light as it
could find for itself, were two men. Besides the two men, a
notched and disfigured bench, immovable from the wall, with a
draught-board rudely hacked upon it with a knife, a set of
draughts, made of old buttons and soup bones, a set of dominoes,
two mats, and two or three wine bottles. That was all the chamber
held, exclusive of rats and other unseen vermin, in addition to the