The thing that worried him was that the monitor was sick,
and holding out with difficulty. Should he give up, should he falter for
a moment, out would rush these intolerable things--only Anthony could
know what a state of blackness there would be if the worst of him could
roam his consciousness unchecked.
The heat of the day had changed, somehow, until it was a burnished
darkness crushing down upon a devastated land. Over his head the blue
circles of ominous uncharted suns, of unnumbered centres of fire,
revolved interminably before his eyes as though he were lying constantly
exposed to the hot light and in a state of feverish coma. At seven in
the morning something phantasmal, something almost absurdly unreal that
he knew was his mortal body, went out with seven other prisoners and two
guards to work on the camp roads. One day they loaded and unloaded
quantities of gravel, spread it, raked it--the next day they worked with
huge barrels of red-hot tar, flooding the gravel with black, shining
pools of molten heat. At night, locked up in the guard-house, he would
lie without thought, without courage to compass thought, staring at the
irregular beams of the ceiling overhead until about three o'clock, when
he would slip into a broken, troubled sleep.
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