What with the dust and scraps of paper whirled against people’s legs, the streets grew emptier.
Those few who went out could be seen hurrying along, bent forward, with handkerchiefs or their hands pressed to their mouths.
At nightfall, instead of the usual throng of people, each trying to prolong a day that might well be his last, you met only small groups hastening home or to a favorite cafe. With the result that for several days when twilight came—it fell much quicker at this time of the year—the streets were almost empty, and silent but for the long-drawn stridence of the wind.
A smell of brine and seaweed came from the unseen, storm-tossed sea.
And in the growing darkness the almost empty town, palled in dust, swept by bitter sea-spray, and loud with the shrilling of the wind, seemed a lost island of the damned.
Hitherto the plague had found far more victims in the more thickly populated and less well-appointed outer districts than in the heart of the town.
Quite suddenly, however, it launched a new attack and established itself in the business center.
Residents accused the wind of carrying infection, “broadcasting germs,” as the hotel manager put it.
Whatever the reason might be, people living in the central districts realized that their turn had come when each night they heard oftener and oftener the ambulances clanging past, sounding the plague’s dismal, passionless tocsin under their windows.
The authorities had the idea of segregating certain particularly affected central areas and permitting only those whose services were indispensable to cross the cordon.
Dwellers in these districts could not help regarding these regulations as a sort of taboo specially directed at themselves, and thus they came, by contrast, to envy residents in other areas their freedom.
And the latter, to cheer themselves up in despondent moments, fell to picturing the lot of those others less free than themselves.
“Anyhow, there are some worse off than I,” was a remark that voiced the only solace to be had in those days.
About the same time we had a recrudescence of outbreaks of fire, especially in the residential area near the west gate.
It was found, after inquiry, that people who had returned from quarantine were responsible for these fires. Thrown off their balance by bereavement and anxiety, they were burning their houses under the odd delusion that they were killing off the plague in the holocaust.
Great difficulty was experienced in fighting these fires, whose numbers and frequency exposed whole districts to constant danger, owing to the high wind.
When the attempts made by the authorities to convince these well-meaning incendiaries that the official fumigation of their houses effectively removed any risk of infection had proved unavailing, it became necessary to decree very heavy penalties for this type of arson.
And most likely it was not the prospect of mere imprisonment that deterred these unhappy people, but the common belief that a sentence of imprisonment was tantamount to a death sentence, owing to the very high mortality prevailing in the town jail.
It must be admitted that there was some foundation for this belief.
It seemed that, for obvious reasons, the plague launched its most virulent attacks on those who lived, by choice or by necessity, in groups: soldiers, prisoners, monks, and nuns.
For though some prisoners are kept solitary, a prison forms a sort of community, as is proved by the fact that in our town jail the guards died of plague in the same proportion as the prisoners.
The plague was no respecter of persons and under its despotic rule everyone, from the warden down to the humblest delinquent, was under sentence and, perhaps for the first time, impartial justice reigned in the prison.
Attempts made by the authorities to redress this leveling-out by some sort of hierarchy—the idea was to confer a decoration on guards who died in the exercise of their duties—came to nothing.
Since martial law had been declared and the guards might, from a certain angle, be regarded as on active service, they were awarded posthumously the military medal.
But though the prisoners raised no protest, strong exception was taken in military circles, and it was pointed out, logically enough, that a most regrettable confusion in the public mind would certainly ensue.
The civil authority conceded the point and decided that the simplest solution was to bestow on guards who died at their post a “plague medal.”
Even so, since as regards the first recipients of the military medal the harm had been done and there was no question of withdrawing the decoration from them, the military were still dissatisfied.
Moreover, the plague medal had the disadvantage of having far less moral effect than that attaching to a military award, since in time of pestilence a decoration of this sort is too easily acquired.
Thus nobody was satisfied.
Another difficulty was that the jail administration could not follow the procedure adopted by the religious and, in a lesser degree, the military authorities.
The monks in the two monasteries of the town had been evacuated and lodged for the time being with religious-minded families.
In the same way, whenever possible, small bodies of men had been moved out of barracks and billeted in schools or public buildings.
Thus the disease, which apparently had forced on us the solidarity of a beleaguered town, disrupted at the same time long-established communities and sent men out to live, as individuals, in relative isolation.
This, too, added to the general feeling of unrest.
Indeed, it can easily be imagined that these changes, combined with the high wind, also had an incendiary effect on certain minds.
There were frequent attacks on the gates of the town, and the men who made them now were armed.
Shots were exchanged, there were casualties, and some few got away.
Then the sentry posts were reinforced, and such attempts quickly ceased.
Nonetheless, they sufficed to start a wave of revolutionary violence, though only on a small scale.
Houses that had been burnt or closed by the sanitary control were looted.
However, it seemed unlikely that these excesses were premeditated.
Usually it was some chance incentive that led normally well-behaved people to acts which promptly had their imitators.
Thus you sometimes saw a man, acting on some crazy impulse, dash into a blazing house under the eyes of its owner, who was standing by, dazed with grief, watching the flames.
Seeing his indifference, many of the onlookers would follow the lead given by the first man, and presently the dark street was full of running men, changed to hunched, misshapen gnomes by the flickering glow from the dying flames and the ornaments or furniture they carried on their shoulders.
It was incidents of this sort that compelled the authorities to declare martial law and enforce the regulations deriving from it.
Two looters were shot, but we may doubt if this made much impression on the others; with so many deaths taking place every day, these two executions went unheeded—a mere drop in the ocean.
Actually scenes of this kind continued to take place fairly often, without the authorities’ making even a show of intervening.
The only regulation that seemed to have some effect on the populace was the establishment of a curfew hour.
From eleven onwards, plunged in complete darkness, Oran seemed a huge necropolis.
On moonlight nights the long, straight street and dirty white walls, nowhere darkened by the shadow of a tree, their peace untroubled by footsteps or a dog’s bark, glimmered in pale recession.