It was a land desolated
and destroyed. At Ragusa, at Salona, at Spalato and Zara and Pola
Benham had seen only variations upon one persistent theme, a
dwindled and uncreative human life living amidst the giant ruins of
preceding times, as worms live in the sockets of a skull. Forward
an unsavoury group of passengers still slumbered amidst fruit-peel
and expectorations, a few soldiers, some squalid brigands armed with
preposterous red umbrellas, a group of curled-up human lumps brooded
over by an aquiline individual caparisoned with brass like a horse,
his head wrapped picturesquely in a shawl. Benham surveyed these
last products of the "life force" and resumed his pensive survey of
the coast. The sea was deserted save for a couple of little lateen
craft with suns painted on their gaudy sails, sea butterflies that
hung motionless as if unawakened close inshore. . . .
The travel of the last few weeks had impressed Benham's imagination
profoundly. For the first time in his life he had come face to face
with civilization in defeat. From Venice hitherward he had marked
with cumulative effect the clustering evidences of effort spent and
power crumbled to nothingness.
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