IV
They had finished their work—the one who was occupied in knocking his head against the wall, and the other who was helping him. When I arrived there, one of them was hanging by a hook driven into the wall. He was still warm, and the other was quietly singing a cheerful song.
“Go and tell the starving man,” said I, and he obeyed, singing as he went. And I saw the starving man struggle up from his stone. Trembling and stumbling, hitting against everything with his sharp elbows, sometimes on all fours, sometimes staggering, he managed to reach the wall, where the man was swinging. His teeth chattered; he laughed gleefully like a child:
“Only a little piece of a foot!” But he was too late; already others, being the stronger, had forestalled him. Pressing one against the other, clawing and biting, they clung round the corpse; they gnawed and munched his feet with relish, and crunched the bones they had worried. But they would not let him have any. He squatted down on his heels, and watched the others as they ate, swallowing with furred tongue, and emitted a prolonged howl from his great empty mouth:
“I am st—ar—ving.”
Was it not laughable! He had died for the famished one, and the latter did not get even a piece of his foot! And I laughed, and the other leper laughed, and his wife too winked her crafty eyes in derision.
But he howled only the more loudly and furiously:
“I am st—ar—ving.”
And the hoarseness went out from his voice, which rose in a pure metallic sound, piercing and clear; and striking against the wall, then reverberating, it flew over the dark abysses and the hoary tops of the mountains.
And presently those, who were near the wall, began to howl; and they were numerous, and as greedy and hungry, as locusts, and it seemed as though the burnt-up earth howled in unbearable tortures, opening wide her stony jaws. It was as though a forest of dried-up trees, bent in one direction by a violent wind, stretched forth their trembling hands to the wall, gaunt, piteous, prayerful; and so great was their despair that the very rocks trembled, and the purple white-capped thunder clouds fled in terror. But the wall remained high and immovable, and unconcernedly reechoed the moan in multiplied reverberations into the dense fetor-laden atmosphere.
All eyes were turned to the wall, and darted on it fiery rays. They hoped and believed, that it would soon be falling and open out a new world, and in their blind belief began already to see the stones rock, the stone serpent, which had battened on the blood and brains of men, tremble from top to bottom. Maybe it was the tremble of the tears in our eyes, which we mistook for the trembling of the wall—and still more piercing was our cry. Anger and exultation at the near approach of victory resounded in it.