"Stop! Stop!"
"Charity!"
"Pity! Pity!"
But the coachman, becoming angry, rose suddenly on his seat, shook his whip vigorously, and began to beat the beggars with all his might; and he accompanied every blow with invectives. The lash whistled. Beneath his blows the beggars howled maledictions, but did not retreat. Each wished his share.
"Give me some! Give me some!"
Then George threw a handful of coins in the dust; and the dust covered the scuffle of the monsters, choked their blasphemies. The man with the amputated hands and the fellow with the inert limbs still essayed to follow the carriage for a moment; but, menaced by the whip, they stopped.
"Don't be afraid, signora," said the coachman. "Nobody will get near us now, I promise you."
New voices arose, groaning, yelling, invoking the Virgin and Jesus, announcing the nature of their deformities and sores, recounting the malady or misfortune. On the other side of the ambush prepared by the first bandits, a second army in tatters stretched along in a double chain on the borders of the road as far as the houses of the distant market town.
"My God, my God! What a cursed country!" murmured Hippolyte, exhausted, feeling herself fainting. "Let us get away from here. Let us go away! Please, George, let us go back."
Nothing—not the whirlwind of madness that drove the fanatic bands around the temple, nor the hopeless cries that seemed to issue from a place on fire, from a shipwreck or a massacre, nor the inanimate and bloody old men who lay in heaps along the court of the votive hall, nor the convulsed women who crawled towards the altar tearing their tongues against the stone, nor the supreme clamor that issued from the entrails of the multitude confounded in an unique anguish and in an unique hope—nothing, nothing, was as terrible as the spectacle of that great dusty hillside blinding in the glare of the sun, where all these monsters of human misery, all this débris of a ruined race, these bodies vilified to the level of the unclean beast and excremental matter, opened their rags to expose their impurities and proclaim them. The innumerable horde occupied the slope and the ditches; they had with them their family, their progeniture, their relatives, their household goods. One saw women half-naked and as lean as bitches who have just littered, children green as lizards, emaciated, with rapacious eyes, their mouths already withered, taciturn, breeding in the blood the hereditary disease. Each tribe possessed its monster: one-armed, bandy-legged, subject to goitre, blindness, leprosy, epilepsy. Each had as a patrimony his ulcer to cultivate, from which to derive an income. Urged on by his own people, the monster left the group, advanced in the dust, gesticulated and implored, for the common benefit: