On the morrow, the spahi, lying on his wretched little grey mattress, was placed on a stretcher and taken to hospital.
XVIII
Noon!... The hospital is as still as a great mortuary.
Noon!... The grasshopper is chirping. The African woman is singing in her thin voice her vague and drowsy song. Upon the whole expanse of the desert plains of Senegal the sun darts down its perpendicular rays of torrid light, which the vast horizon reflects in shimmer and glitter.
Noon!... The hospital is as still as a great mortuary. The long, white galleries, the long corridors are deserted. Half way up the high, bare wall, lime-washed a dazzling white, hangs a clock, pointing to noon with it slow-moving hands of steel. The grey-lettered, mournful inscription around the dial is fading in the sun, Vitæ fugaces exhibet horas. The twelve strokes ring out painfully, with that feeble tone that the dying know; that tone, heard in feverish, wakeful hours, by those who have come hither to die; that tone like a knell, tolled in an atmosphere too heavy with heat to conduct the sounds.
Noon!... The mournful hour, when sick men die. The air of this hospital is heavy with fever, the indefinable emanations, as it were, of death.
Above, in an open ward, are voices that whispered softly; little, scarcely perceptible sounds; the good sister’s cautious footsteps, as she moves carefully over the mats. She comes and goes with a troubled air, Sister Pacôme, with her pale, sallow face under her nurse’s cap. Doctor and priest are there, too, seated beside a bed, which is curtained with a white mosquito net.
Out-of-door, through the open window, are sun and sand, sand and sun, and far away, blue outlines and shimmering light.
Will he pass away, poor spahi?...