高英第2课课文

Marrakech

George Orwell

As the corpse went past the flies left the resta urant table in a cloud and rushed after it, but t hey came back a few minutes later.

The little crowd of mourners -- all men and boy s, no women--threaded their way across the market p lace between the piles of pomegranates and the taxi s and the camels, walling a short chant over an d over again. What really appeals to the flies i s that the corpses here are never put into coffin s, they are merely wrapped in a piece of rag an d carried on a rough wooden bier on the shoulder s of four friends. When the friends get to the bu rying-ground they hack an oblong hole a foot or tw o deep, dump the body in it and fling over i t a little of the dried-up, lumpy earth, which i s like broken brick. No gravestone, no name, no id entifying mark of any kind. The burying-ground is m erely a huge waste of hummocky earth, like a derel

ict building-lot. After a month or two no one ca n even be certain where his own relatives are buri ed.

When you walk through a town like this -- tw o hundred thousand inhabitants of whom at least twe nty thousand own literally nothing except the rag s they stand up in-- when you see how the peopl e live, and still more how easily they die, it i s always difficult to believe that you are walkin g among human beings. All colonial empires are i n reality founded upon this fact. The people hav e brown faces--besides, there are so many of the m! Are they really the same flesh as your self D o they even have names Or are they merely a kin d of undifferentiated brown stuff, about as individu al as bees or coral insects They rise out of th e earth，they sweat and starve for a few years, an d then they sink back into the nameless mounds o f the graveyard and nobody notices that they are g one. And even the graves themselves soon fade bac k into the soil. Sometimes, out for a walk as yo u break your way through the prickly pear, you not

ice that it is rather bumpy underfoot, and onl y a certain regularity in the bumps tells you tha t you are walking over skeletons.

I was feeding one of the gazelles in the publi c gardens.

Gazelles are almost the only animals that look go od to eat when they are still alive, in fact, on e can hardly look at their hindquarters without thi nking of a mint sauce. The gazelle I was feedin g seemed to know that this thought was in my min d, for though it took the piece of bread I was h olding out it obviously did not like me. It nibble d nibbled rapidly at the bread, then lowered its h ead and tried to butt me, then took another nibbl e and then butted again. Probably its idea was tha t if it could drive me away the bread would someh ow remain hanging in mid-air.

An Arab navvy working on the path nearby lowered h is heavy hoe and sidled slowly towards us. He look ed from the gazelle to the bread and from the bre ad to the gazelle, with a sort of quiet amazemen