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1、Marrakech George Orwell As the corpse went past the flies left the restaurant table in a cloud and rushed after it, but they came back a few minutes later. The little crowd of mourners - all men and boys, no women-threaded their way across the market place between the piles of pomegranates and the t
2、axis and the camels, walling a short chant over and over again. What really appeals to the flies is that the corpses here are never put into coffins, they are merely wrapped in a piece of rag and carried on a rough wooden bier on the shoulders of four friends. When the friends get to the burying-gro
3、und they hack an oblong hole a foot or two deep, dump the body in it and fling over it a little of the dried-up, lumpy earth, which is like broken brick. No gravestone, no name, no identifying mark of any kind. The burying-ground is merely a huge waste of hummocky earth, like a derelict building-lot
4、. After a month or two no one can even be certain where his own relatives are buried. When you walk through a town like this - two hundred thousand inhabitants of whom at least twenty thousand own literally nothing except the rags they stand up in- when you see how the people live, and still more ho
5、w easily they die, it is always difficult to believe that you are walking among human beings. All colonial empires are in reality founded upon this fact. The people have brown faces-besides, there are so many of them! Are they really the same flesh as your self? Do theyeven have names? Or are they m
6、erely a kind of undifferentiated brown stuff, about as individual as bees or coral insects? They rise out of the earth，they sweat and starve for a few years, and then they sink back into the nameless mounds of the graveyard and nobody notices that they are gone. And even the graves themselves soon f
7、ade back into the soil. Sometimes, out for a walk as you break your way through the prickly pear, you notice that it is rather bumpy underfoot, and only a certain regularity in the bumps tells you that you are walking over skeletons. I was feeding one of the gazelles in the public gardens. Gazelles
8、are almost the only animals that look good to eat when they are still alive, in fact, one can hardly look at their hindquarters without thinking of a mint sauce. The gazelle I was feeding seemed to know that this thought was in my mind, for though it took the piece of bread I was holding out it obvi
9、ously did not like me. It nibbled nibbled rapidly at the bread, then lowered its head and tried to butt me, then took another nibble and then butted again. Probably its idea was that if it could drive me away the bread would somehow remain hanging in mid-air. An Arab navvy working on the path nearby
10、 lowered his heavy hoe and sidled slowly towards us. He looked from the gazelle to the bread and from the bread to the gazelle, with a sort of quiet amazement, as though he had never seen anything quite like this before. Finally he said shyly in French: 1 could eat some of that bread. I tore off a p
11、iece and he stowed it gratefully in some secret place under his rags. This man is an employee of the municipality. When you go through the Jewish Quarters you gather some idea of what the medieval ghettoes were probably like. Under their Moorish Moorishrulers the Jews were only allowed to own land i
12、ncertain restricted areas, and after centuries of this kind of treatment they have ceased to bother about overcrowding. Many of the streets are a good deal less than six feet wide, the houses are completely windowless, and sore-eyed children cluster everywhere in unbelievable numbers, like clouds of
13、 flies. Down the centre of the street there is generally running a little river of urine. In the bazaar huge families of Jews, all dressed in the long black robe and little black skull-cap, are working in dark fly-infested booths that look like caves. A carpenter sits crosslegged at a prehistoric la
14、the, turning chairlegs at lightning speed. He works the lathe with a bow in his right hand andguides the chisel with his left foot, and thanks to a lifetime of sitting in this position his left leg is warped out of shape. At his side his grandson, aged six, is already starting on the simpler parts o
15、f the job. I was just passing the coppersmiths booths when somebody noticed that I was lighting a cigarette. Instantly, from the dark holes all round, there was a frenzied rush of Jews, many of them old grandfathers with flowing grey beards, all clamouring for a cigarette. Even a blind man somewhere
16、 at the back of one of the booths heard a rumour of cigarettes and came crawling out, groping in the air with his hand. In about a minute I had used up the whole packet. None of these people, I suppose, works less than twelve hours a day, and every one of them looks on a cigarette as a more or less impossible luxury. As the Jews live in self-contained communities they follow the same trades as the Arabs, exceptfor agriculture. Fruitsellers, potters, silversmiths, blacksmith
