“The Red and Heavy Audit”

Albumleaf 47: November 29, 2010 (Farmville)

The city below them was locked up in its own torments. Sulpher fires blazed in the streets; the conches in the Hindu temples screamed and bellowed, for the gods were inattentive in those days. There was a service in the great Mohammedan shrine, and the call to prayer from the minarets was almost unceasing. They heard the wailing in the houses of the dead, and once the shriek of a mother who had lost a child and was calling for its return. In the gray dawn they saw the dead borne out through the city gates, each litter with its own little knot of mourners. Wherefore they kissed each other and shivered.

–from Rudyard Kipling, “Without Benefit of Clergy”


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