United States or Equatorial Guinea ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The well-to-do had made for their families shelters with heavy boxes and dusty mats; the poor reposed side by side with all they had on earth tied up in a rag under their heads; the lone old men slept, with drawn-up legs, upon their prayer-carpets, with their hands over their ears and one elbow on each side of the face; a father, his shoulders up and his knees under his forehead, dozed dejectedly by a boy who slept on his back with tousled hair and one arm commandingly extended; a woman covered from head to foot, like a corpse, with a piece of white sheeting, had a naked child in the hollow of each arm; the Arab's belongings, piled right aft, made a heavy mound of broken outlines, with a cargo-lamp swung above, and a great confusion of vague forms behind: gleams of paunchy brass pots, the foot-rest of a deck-chair, blades of spears, the straight scabbard of an old sword leaning against a heap of pillows, the spout of a tin coffee-pot.
There was nobody at the top of the gangway under the big cargo-lamp, and its illumination did not carry far across the wharf. If he could reach the latter, he would soon be lost in the gloom, and he was sensible of a curious impulse that urged him to flight. It almost amounted to panic, and he imagined that the other men's desertion must have daunted him.
Word Of The Day