For some minutes he had noticed a glow upon the city buildings, which he had thought to be the dawn. He now found that it came from the red-hot shell of what had been the de Leyva palace, which had been burnt since midnight. A good many Medinas people were grubbing in the embers for what they could find. Others were carrying away what they had already found. A heap of things of all sorts, armour, pictures, marbles, bronzes, furniture, porcelain, curtains, clothes, cushions, musical instruments, antiques, books, and portfolios, which had been looted before the fire took hold, were being sold to all comers by a ruffian with a big voice, who bellowed aloud his bargains, joked, tossed the money received to a guard of Reds, and often gave away what he could not readily sell. He was in the act of selling a bronze female torso when Hi came up. Hi noticed among the crowd the broad-faced picture-dealer who had been rude two days before on the water-front. This man winked at the auctioneer that the bronze should be set aside for him. The auctioneer stopped his obscene remarks and laid it aside.
* * * * * * *
Medinas Close looked marvellous in that light of nearly dawn, helped out by dying lamps. Its well of tall, mean, narrow tenements, built on a slope, about a triangle of grassless earth, needed some murderous half-light to give it its quality. At the entrance to the Close an imbecile woman, with the face of a corpse, held her hand for alms. At the entrance of No. 41, black as the mouth of a cave, two little boys, who talked through their noses as though their throats were rotted away, were sharing what they had stolen from the burning. Most of the Medinas tenants had been picking plums from that same snapdragon. In the well of the Close were some chairs and other furniture which had been pitched down and smashed, because they would not readily go through the narrow doors.
“On the third floor,” Hi said to himself, “the middle room of the three, if I don’t have my throat cut on the way.” He went into that black cave, which stank of rat and mouse; he struck himself a light so that he might see the stairs, and came at once on a woman and a man clasped at the stair-foot. He saw the woman’s eyes, like the eyes in a skull. The man detached himself from her; he stank of wine, she of musk. “You like to see my sister?” he said, thickly to Hi.
“No.”
“Three pesetas.”
“No.”
“Two pesetas.”
“No.”
“You like to buy a nice watch, very cheap, very good?” The woman, who had caught some glimpse of Hi, said something in a low voice, which made the man stand aside to let Hi pass to the next floor, where a man was beating his wife in the intervals of a sermon. The morning light gleamed a little on to this landing from a room which had no door. Up above was the third floor, much darker, being lit only with a taper.