The midnight jackals howled their discontent while heat-cracked India
writhed in stuffy torment that was only one degree less than unendurable.
Through the stillness and the blackness of the night came every now
and then the high-pitched undulating wails of women, that no one
answered-for, under that Tophet-lid of blackness, punctured by the
low-hung, steel-white stars, men neither knew nor cared whose child
had died. Life and hell-hot torture and indifference--all three were one.
There was no moon, nothing to make the inferno visible, except that
here and there an oil lamp on some housetop glowed like a blood-spot
against the blackness. It was a sensation, rather than sight or sound,
that betrayed the neighborhood of thousands upon thousands of human
beings, sprawling, writhing, twisting upon the roofs, in restless
suffering.
There was no pity in the dry, black vault of heaven, nor in the bone-dry
earth, nor in the hearts of men, during that hot weather of '57.
Men waited for the threatened wrath to come and writhed and held
their tongues.
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