Ortho’s head sank in his hands. All over now, all gone. . . . Something flapped in the shadows by the orange trees, flapped and hopped out into the central moonlight and posed there stretching its crippled wings.
It was the old eagle disgustingly bloated.
That alone remained, that and the loathly beggar, left alone in the dead city to their carrion orgy. A shock of revulsion shook Ortho. Ugh!
He sprang up and, without looking round, strode out of the house and down the street to where his horse was standing.
A puff of hot wind followed him, a furnace blast, foul with the stench of half-buried corpses in the big Mussulman cemetery outside the walls. Ugh!
He kicked sharp stirrups into his horse and rode through the Ksiba Gate.
“Fleeing from the sickness—eh?” sneered a mokaddem of Sudanese who could not fly.
“No—ghosts,” said Ortho and turned his beast onto the western road.
“The sea! The sea!”