I do not know how long a space I passed in this negatively happy state of removal from existence, but I was torn out of it suddenly and forcibly. It was no noise, no shock that woke me, but a vapour of intolerably poisoned air.
“What is that?”
The others called out the same question at the same time as I did.
Our waggon turned round a corner, and at the side of the way we found the answer. Brightly lighted by the moon there stood up a white wall, probably of a church. Anyhow, it had served as a cover from gunshot. At its foot, heaped up, lay numerous corpses. It was the smell of putrefaction, which rose up from their dead bodies, that had broken my sleep. As we drove by, a thick crowd of ravens and crows rose screaming from the heap of dead, fluttered for a time, as a black cloud against the clear background of the sky, and then settled down again to their feast.
“Frederick! my Frederick!”
“Calm yourself, Baroness Martha,” said Bresser consolingly. “Your husband could not have been present there.”
The soldier who was driving had pressed his team on in order to get away the quicker from the neighbourhood of the mephitic vapour—the conveyance clattered and jolted as if we were in wild flight. I thought the horses had run away ... trembling fear took hold on me. With both hands I clasped Bresser’s arm, but I could not help turning my head back to look there at that wall, and—was it the deceptive light of the moon, or was it the movements hither and thither of the birds as they came back to their booty? I thought that the whole troop of the dead rose up, and that the corpses all stretched their arms towards us, and made ready to pursue us. I would have shrieked, but my throat was closed by fear and would not obey my impulse.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Again the waggon turned round the corner of a street.
“Here we are—this is Horonewos,” I heard the doctor say, and he ordered the driver to stop.