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Her wounds were many; they had depleted her strength; but in freedom is a balm that cures. Her strength might be irrevocable and the cicatrices not to be effaced, yet give her that balm, and come what sorrow could. As for resignation, the idea of it did not so much as visit her. Resignation is a daily suicide, and she had not enough to outlast the night. The hours limped.
They are a species of abortive pustules. After the desiccation, the skin remains covered by brown spots, which, by degrees, die away. There remains no trace of the disease, except a few superficial cicatrices on which the hair does not grow.
Frequently the faces, and other parts of those who recovered, were disfigured by the ghastly cicatrices of healed ulcers. This I do not pretend to account for. We thought at the time that the Rebels had deliberately poisoned the vaccine matter with syphilitic virus, and it was so charged upon them.
They accord with the sombre bulging of the foliage, in which now there are only images of giant or dwarf hips, feminine triangles, great V's, mouths of Sodom, glowing cicatrices, humid vents. This landscape of abomination changes. Gilles now sees on the trunks frightful cancers and horrible wens. He observes exostoses and ulcers, membranous sores, tubercular chancres, atrocious caries.
They show you, to use the poet's words: "'Where the gor'd battle bled at ev'ry vein! "One of these warriors in particular shows the cicatrices of four bullet holes through his body. "These men have been bred in the woods to hardships and dangers since their infancy. They appear as if they were entirely unacquainted with, and had never felt the passion of fear.
Many of them wore chains, and on their bodies the cicatrices of the recent war were still fresh. They glared at the hostile people, contracting their mouths as if with desire to bite and some of them restlessly moved their right arms which terminated in mere formless stumps.
Indeed several of them were marked by the cicatrices of old wounds, which probably they had received in encounters with antagonists of their own species, or in battles with some other voracious monsters of the deep.
One was an Iberian, the other with bronzed skin and athletic frame looked like a Libyan, and his cheeks, calloused by the helmet and his neck and arms furrowed with cicatrices, denoted the professional paid warrior who had fought with indifference since childhood, now in the service of one nation and now in that of its adversary. "I am in the service of Saguntum," said the Libyan.
Seated on stone benches were sailors from all countries, demanding food in their several languages Roman soldiers wearing corselets of bronze scales, short swords hanging from their shoulders; at their feet helmets topped by a crest of red horsehair in the form of a brush; rowers from Massilia, almost naked, their knives half hidden among the folds of the rag knotted around their waists; Phœnician and Carthaginian mariners with wide trousers, wearing tall caps in the form of mitres with heavy silver pendants; negroes from Alexandria, athletic and slow of movement, displaying their sharp teeth as they smiled, making one think of frightful cannibalistic scenes; Celtiberians and Iberians with gloomy dress and tangled hair, looking suspiciously in all directions, and instinctively raising their hands to their broad knives; some redmen from Gaul, with long mustaches and coarse red hair tied behind and falling down their necks; people, in fine, who had come, or had been flung by the hazards of war and the sea, from one point of the known world to another, one day victorious warriors, and slaves the next, now sailors and anon pirates, acknowledging no law nor nationality; with no other respect than the fear of the master of the vessel who was quick to order them to the whip or the cross; with no other religion than that of the sword and the strong arm; testifying by the wounds which covered their bodies, in the long cicatrices which furrowed their muscles, by cuts on their ears covered by matted hair, to a past mysterious with horrors.
On the inspection of the abdomen of a pregnant woman there will be noticed a brown line which extends from the umbilicus to the pubes, and all over the surface the presence of striae, or long purple grooves, due to the distention of the abdomen; on the sides of the abdomen and down the thighs, red, blue, or white markings, like cicatrices, may be seen. Quickening.
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