that chain-gang get out of sight before I climbed the hill. You know
I am not particularly tender; I've had to strike and to fend off.
I've had to resist and to attack sometimes--that's only one way of
resisting--without counting the exact cost, according to the demands
of such sort of life as I had blundered into. I've seen the devil of
violence, and the devil of greed, and the devil of hot desire; but, by
all the stars! these were strong, lusty, red-eyed devils, that swayed
and drove men--men, I tell you. But as I stood on this hillside, I
foresaw that in the blinding sunshine of that land I would become
acquainted with a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and
pitiless folly. How insidious he could be, too, I was only to find out
several months later and a thousand miles farther. For a moment I
stood appalled, as though by a warning. Finally I descended the hill,
obliquely, towards the trees I had seen.

"I avoided a vast artificial hole somebody had been digging on the
slope, the purpose of which I found it impossible to divine. It wasn't
a quarry or a sandpit, anyhow. It was just a hole. It might have
been connected with the philanthropic desire of giving the criminals
something to do. I don't know. Then I nearly fell into a very narrow
ravine, almost no more than a scar in the hillside. I discovered that
a lot of imported drainage-pipes for the settlement had been tumbled in
there. There wasn't one that was not broken. It was a wanton smash-up.
At last I got under the trees. My purpose was to stroll into the shade
for a moment; but no sooner within than it seemed to me I had stepped
into the gloomy circle of some Inferno. The rapids were near, and an
uninterrupted, uniform, headlong, rushing noise filled the mournful
stillness of the grove, where not a breath stirred, not a leaf moved,
with a mysterious sound--as though the tearing pace of the launched
earth had suddenly become audible.

"Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees leaning against the
trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within
the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair.
Another mine on the cliff went off, followed by a slight shudder of the
soil under my feet. The work was going on. The work! And this was the
place where some of the helpers had withdrawn to die.

"They were dying slowly--it was very clear. They were not enemies, they
were not criminals, they were nothing ea