The sun came in through the windows, a tired and ancient sun,
yellow as parchment and stretched out of shape in transit. It tried to
enter in triumphant squares and produced only warped splotches--but it
was appallingly steady; so much so that it disturbed Anthony not to be
the pivot of all the inconsequential sawmills and trees and telegraph
poles that were turning around him so fast. Outside it played its heavy
tremolo over olive roads and fallow cotton-fields, back of which ran a
ragged line of woods broken with eminences of gray rock. The foreground
was dotted sparsely with wretched, ill-patched shanties, among which
there would flash by, now and then, a specimen of the languid yokelry of
South Carolina, or else a strolling darky with sullen and
bewildered eyes.
Then the woods moved off and they rolled into a broad space like the
baked top of a gigantic cake, sugared with an infinity of tents arranged
in geometric figures over its surface. The train came to an uncertain
stop, and the sun and the poles and the trees faded, and his universe
rocked itself slowly back to its old usualness, with Anthony Patch in
the centre. As the men, weary and perspiring, crowded out of the car, he
smelt that unforgetable aroma that impregnates all permanent camps--the
odor of garbage.
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