Format: Single
…silence follows – the silence that is full of the night noises of a great city…High overhead someone throws open a window, and the rattle of the woodwork echoes down the empty street…A bar of moonlight falls across the forehead and eyes of the sleeper, but he never stirs. It is close upon midnight, and the heat seems to be increasing… |
This is from “The City of Dreadful Night” in Life’s Handicap. The narrator is wandering through Lahore City in the moonlight, one stifling night in the hot season, when the road is lined with the bodies of the sleepers, some of them wrapped in shroud-like cloths, some naked. He hears the muezzin roaring out his call to prayer at midnight, and does not make his way back until the first light of the dawn. |
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