M. The sky was dark, and a
moaning wind--almost a new thing now to me--had arisen.
I ate some pemmican, for I had a reluctance--needless as it turned
out--to touch any of the thousand luxuries here, sufficient no doubt,
in a town like Dover alone, to last me five or six hundred years, if I
could live so long; and, having eaten, I descended The Shaft, and spent
the whole day, though it rained and blustered continually, in wandering
about. Reasoning, in my numb way, from the number of ships on the sea, I
expected to find the town over-crowded with dead: but this was not so;
and I should say, at a venture, that not a thousand English, nor fifteen
thousand foreigners, were in it: for that westward rage and stampede
must have operated here also, leaving the town empty but for the ever
new-coming hosts.
The first thing which I did was to go into an open grocer's shop, which
was also a post and telegraph office, with the notion, I suppose, to get
a message through to London. In the shop a single gas-light was burning
its last, and this, with that near the pier, were the only two that I
saw: and ghastly enough they looked, transparently wannish, and as it
were ashamed, like blinking night-things overtaken by the glare of day.
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