Chapter 10
Throughout September and October the city lay prostrate, at the mercy of the plague. There was nothing to do but to “mark time,” and some hundreds of thousands of men and women went on doing this, through weeks that seemed interminable.
Mist, wind, and rain rang their changes in our streets. From the south came silent coveys of ducks and geese, flying very high, but always giving the town a wide berth, as though the strange implement of the plague described by Ed, the giant flail whirling and shrilling over the housetops, warned them off us. At the beginning of October torrents of rain swept the streets clean.
Indeed, the workers in the sanitary squads had given up trying to cope with their fatigue. Bentham noticed the change coming over his associates, and himself as well, a
