They went with much strange shouting and,
to Kan Wong's ears, discordant sounds that they mistook for music. Yet
now and then other strings of carriages came back from the east and
north, with other men--men broken, bloody, lacking limbs, groping in
blindness, their faces twisted with pain as they were loaded into the
waiting fire-junks to recross the rough sea.
Then came the turn of the coolies to be crowded into the boxlike
carriages and to be whisked off to the east. With them went
tools--picks, shovels, and the like--for further work, upon the nature
of which Kan Wong, unquestioning, speculated. It was a slow, broken
journey that they made. Every now and then they stopped that other
traffic might pass them, going either way; mostly the strange men in
uniforms, bristling with guns, hurrying always to the east and north.
At last they too turned north, and as they did so the country, which had
been smiling, low, filled with soft fields and pretty, nestling houses,
little towns and quiet, orderly cities, changed to bleak fields, cut and
seared as by a simoom's angry breath. Still there were little towns--or
what had been little towns, now tumbled ruins--fire-smitten, gutted,
their windows gaping like blind eyes in the face of a twisted cripple.
Off to the east hung angry clouds from which the thunder echoed
distantly; a thunder low, grumbling, continual, menacing, and through
the clouds at night were lightning flashes of an angry red.
Pages:
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201