The gazelle I was feeding seemed to know that this thought was in my mind, for though it took the piece of bread I was holding out it obviously did not like me. Gazelles are almost the only animals that look good to eat when they are still alive, in fact, one can hardly look at their hindquarters without thinking of mint sauce.
I was feeding one of the gazelles in the public gardens. Sometimes, out for a walk, as you break your way through the prickly pear, you notice that it is rather bumpy underfoot, and only a certain regularity in the bumps tells you that you are walking over skeletons. And even the graves themselves soon fade back into the soil. The people have brown faces - besides, there are so many of them! Are they really the same flesh as yourself? Do they even have names? Or are they merely a kind of undifferentiated brown stuff, about as individual as bees or coral insects? They rise out of the earth, they sweat and starve for a few years, and then they sink back into the nameless mounds of the graveyard and nobody notices that they are gone. All colonial empires are in reality founded upon that fact. When you walk through a town like this - two hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom at least twenty thousand own literally nothing except the rags they stand up in - when you see how the people live, and still more how easily they die, it is always difficult to believe that you are walking among human beings. After a month or two no one can even be certain where his own relatives are buried. The burying-ground is merely a huge waste of hummocky earth, like a derelict building-lot.
No gravestone, no name, no identifying mark of any kind. When the friends get to the burying-ground they hack an oblong hole a foot or two deep, dump the body in it and fling over it a little of the dried-up, lumpy earth, which is like broken brick. What really appeals to the flies is that the corpses here are never put into coffins, they are merely wrapped in a piece of rag and carried on a rough wooden bier on the shoulders of four friends. The little crowd of mourners-all men and boys, no women - threaded their way across the market-place between the piles of pomegranates and the taxis and the camels, wailing a short chant over and over again. As the corpse went past the flies left the restaurant table in a cloud and rushed after it, but they came back a few minutes later.
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