Lying beside the river bank, in every attitude and contortion of the death agony, were some dozen prostrate forms of men, women, and children, all dead and still.  It seemed as though they must have crawled forth from the houses when the terrible fever thirst was upon them, and dragging themselves down to the water’s edge, had perished there.  And yet if all were dead, as indeed there could be small doubt from their perfect stillness and rigidity, why did none come forth to bury them?  Already the warm air was tainted and oppressive with that plague-stricken odour so unspeakably deadly to the living.  Why did not the survivors come forth from their homes and bury the dead out of their sight?  Had all fled and left them to their fate?

Father Paul walked calmly onwards, his eyes taking in every detail of the scene.

As he reached the dead around the margin of the stream, he paused and looked upon the faces he had known so well in life, then turning to his two followers, he said: 

“I trow these be all dead corpses, but I will examine each if there be any spark of life remaining.  Go ye into the houses, and if there be any sound persons within, bid them, in the name of humanity and their own safety, come forth and help to bury their brethren.  If they are suffered to lie here longer, every soul in this place will perish!”

Glad enough to turn his eyes from the terrible sight without, Raymond hurried past to the cluster of dwelling places beyond, and entering the first of these himself, signed to Roger to go into the second.  He had some slight difficulty in pushing open the door, not because it was fastened, but owing to some encumbrance behind.  When, however, he succeeded in forcing his way in, he found that the encumbrance was nothing more or less than the body of a woman lying dead along the floor of the tiny room.  Upon a bed in the corner two children were lying, smiling as if in sleep, but both stiff and cold, the livid tokens of the terrible malady visible upon their little bodies, though the end seemed to have been painless.  No other person was in the house, and Raymond, drawing a covering over the children as they lay, turned from the house again with a shudder of compassionate sorrow.  Outside he met Roger coming forth with a look of awe upon his face.

“There be five souls within you door,” he said —­ “an old woman, her two sons and two daughters.  But they are all dead and cold.  I misdoubt me if we find one alive in the place.”

“We must try farther and see,” answered Raymond, his face full of the wondering consternation of so terrible a discovery; and by mutual consent they proceeded in their task together.  There was something so unspeakably awful in going about alone in a veritable city of the dead.