“My dear! My dear!” he said.
“Paul,” she began, in a breaking voice, but Paul would not listen. He pointed his arm westwards over the parapet.
“Look!”
In their neighbourhood all was quiet, though here and there a building was burning near enough to light up from time to time their faces. But away in the southwest a broad red glare canopied the quarter and flames leapt and sank.
“What is that?” asked Marguerite, distracted from her purpose.
“The Mellah,” replied Paul. “They have looted and burnt it. It’s the rule and custom. Whatever the cause of an uprising, the Mellah is the first to suffer.”
Marguerite had never set foot in that quarter. Paul described it to her—its dirty and crowded alleys, its blue-washed houses jammed together and packed with rich treasures and gaudy worthlessness, gramophones blaring out some comic song of London or Paris, slatternly women and men, ten thousand of them, and then the bursting in of the gates.
“And the Jews themselves! What has become of them?” she asked, with a shudder.
“God knows!”
Unarmed, pounded like sheep within their high walls, they were likely to have been butchered like sheep, too.