高级英语Lesson_2_(BooK_2)_Marrakech_课文内容

高级英语Lesson_2_(BooK_2)_Marrakech_课文内容

Marrakech

George Orwell

1 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.

2 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 taxis 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-ground 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. After a month or two no one can even be

certain where his own relatives are buried.

3 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 how 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 they even have names? Or are they merely 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 fade 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.

4 I was feeding one of the gazelles in the public gardens.

5 Gazelles 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 obviously 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.

6 An Arab navvy working on the path nearby 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."

7 I tore off a piece and he stowed it gratefully in some secret

place under his rags. This man is an employee of the municipality.

8 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 in certain

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 flies. Down the centre of the

street there is generally running a little river of urine.

9 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 lathe, turning chairlegs at lightning speed. He works the

lathe with a bow in his right hand and guides 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 of the job.

10 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 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.

11 As the Jews live in self-contained communities they follow the

same trades as the Arabs, except for agriculture. Fruitsellers,

potters, silversmiths, blacksmiths, butchers, leather-workers, tailors,

water-carriers, beggars, porters -- whichever way you look you see

nothing but Jews. As a matter of fact there are thirteen thousand of

them, all living in the space of a few acres. A good job Hitlet

wasn't here. Perhaps he was on his way, however. You hear the usual dark

rumours about Jews, not only from the Arabs but from the poorer

Europeans.

12 "Yes vieux mon vieux, they took my job away from me and

gave it to a Jew. The Jews! They' re the real rulers of this country,

you know. They’ve got all the money. They control the banks, finance --

everything."

13 "But", I said, "isn't it a fact that the average Jew is a

labourer

working for about a penny an hour?"

14 "Ah, that's only for show! They' re all money lenders really.

They' re cunning, the Jews."

15 In just the same way, a couple of hundred years ago, poor old

women used to be burned for witchcraft when they could not even

work enough magic to get themselves a square meal. square meal

16 All people who work with their hands are partly invisible, and

the more important the work they do, the less visible they are. Still, a

white skin is always fairly conspicuous. In northern Europe, when

you see a labourer ploughing a field, you probably give him a second

glance. In a hot country, anywhere south of Gibraltar or east of Suez,

the chances are that you don't even see him. I have noticed this

again and again. In a tropical landscape one's eye takes in

everything except the human beings. It takes in the dried-up soil, the

prickly pear, the palm tree and the distant mountain, but it always

misses the peasant hoeing at his patch. He is the same colour as the

earth, and a great deal less interesting to look at.

17 It is only because of this that the starved countries of Asia and

Africa are accepted as tourist resorts. No one would think of running

cheap trips to the Distressed Areas. But where the human

beings have brown skins their poverty is simply not noticed. What

does Morocco mean to a Frenchman? An orange grove or a job in Government

service. Or to an Englishman? Camels, castles, palm trees, Foreign

Legionnaires, brass trays, and bandits. One could

probably live there for years without noticing that for nine-tenths

of

the people the reality of life is an endless back-breaking struggle

to

wring a little food out of an eroded soil.

18 Most of Morocco is so desolate that no wild animal bigger than a

hare can live on it. Huge areas which were once covered with forest have

turned into a treeless waste where the soil is exactly like broken-up

brick. Nevertheless a good deal of it is cultivated, with

frightful labour. Everything is done by hand. Long lines of women,

bent double like inverted capital Ls, work their way slowly across the

fields, tearing up the prickly weeds with their hands, and the peasant

gathering lucerne for fodder pulls it up stalk by stalk instead of

reaping it, thus saving an inch or two on each stalk. The plough is

a wretched wooden thing, so frail that one can easily carry it on one's

shoulder, and fitted underneath with a rough iron spike which stirs the

soil to a depth of about four inches. This is as much as the strength of

the animals is equal to. It is usual to plough with a cow and a donkey

yoked together. Two donkeys would not be quite strong enough, but on the

other hand two cows would cost a little more to feed. The

peasants possess no narrows, they merely plough the soil several

times over in different directions, finally leaving it in rough furrows,

after which the whole field has to be shaped with hoes into small

oblong patches to conserve water. Except for a day or two after the

rare rainstorms there is never enough water. A long the edges of the

fields channels are hacked out to a depth of thirty or forty feet to get

at the tiny trickles which run through the subsoil.

19 Every afternoon a file of very old women passes down the

road outside my house, each carrying a load of firewood. All of them

are mummified with age and the sun, and all of them are tiny. It seems

to be generally the case in primitive communities that the women, when

they get beyond a certain age, shrink to the size of

children. One day poor creature who could not have been more than

four feet tall crept past me under a vast load of wood. I stopped her

and put a five-sou sou piece ( a little more than a farthing into her

hand. She answered with a shrill wail, almost a scream, which was

partly gratitude but mainly surprise. I suppose that from her point of

view, by taking any notice of her, I seemed almost to be violating a law

of nature. She accept- ed her status as an old woman, that is to

say as a beast of burden. When a family is travelling it is quite

usual to see a father and a grown-up son riding ahead on donkeys, and an

old woman following on foot, carrying the baggage.

20 But what is strange about these people is their invisibility. For

several weeks, always at about the same time of day, the file of old

women had hobbled past the house with their firewood, and though they

had registered themselves on my eyeballs I cannot truly say that

I had seen them. Firewood was passing -- that was how I saw it. It

was only that one day I happened to be walking behind them, and the

curious up-and-down motion of a load of wood drew my attention to the

human being beneath it. Then for the first time I noticed the poor

old earth-coloured bodies, bodies reduced to bones and leathery

skin, bent double under the crushing weight. Yet I suppose I had not

been five minutes on Moroccan soil before I noticed the overloading of

the donkeys and was infuriated by it. There is no question that the

donkeys are damnably treated. The Moroccan donkey is hardly bigger

than a St. Bernard dog, it carries a load which in the British Army

would be considered too much for a fifteen-hands mule, and

very often its packsaddle is not taken off its back for weeks

together. But what is peculiarly pitiful is that it is the most willing

creature on earth, it follows its master like a dog and does not need

either bridle

or halter . After a dozen years of devoted work it suddenly drops

dead, whereupon its master tips it into the ditch and the village

dogs have torn its guts out before it is cold.

21 This kind of thing makes one's blood boil, whereas-- on the

whole -- the plight of the human beings does not. I am not

commenting, merely pointing to a fact. People with brown skins are

next door to invisible. Anyone can be sorry for the donkey with its

galled back, but it is generally owing to some kind of accident if one

even notices the old woman under her load of sticks.

22 As the storks flew northward the Negroes were marching

southward -- a long, dusty column, infantry , screw-gun batteries,

and then more infantry, four or five thousand men in all, winding up

the road with a clumping of boots and a clatter of iron wheels.

23 They were Senegalese, the blackest Negroes in Africa, so

black that sometimes it is difficult to see whereabouts on their

necks the hair begins. Their splendid bodies were hidden in

reach-me-down khaki uniforms, their feet squashed into boots that

looked like blocks of wood, and every tin hat seemed to be a couple

of sizes too small. It was very hot and the men had marched a long way.

They slumped under the weight of their packs and the curiously sensitive

black faces were glistening with sweat.

24 As they went past, a tall, very young Negro turned and caught my

eye. But the look he gave me was not in the least the kind of look you

might expect. Not hostile, not contemptuous, not sullen, not

even inquisitive. It was the shy, wide-eyed Negro look, which

actually

is a look of profound respect. I saw how it was. This wretched boy,

who is a French citizen and has therefore been dragged from the forest

to scrub floors and catch syphilis in garrison towns, actually

has feelings of reverence before a white skin. He has been taught

that the white race are his masters, and he still believes it.

25 But there is one thought which every white man (and in this

connection it doesn't matter twopence if he calls himself a socialist)

thinks when he sees a black army marching past. "How much longer

can we go on kidding these people? How long before they turn their

guns in the other direction?"

26 It was curious really. Every white man there had this thought

stowed somewhere or other in his mind. I had it, so had the other

onlookers, so had the officers on their sweating chargers and the

white N. C. Os marching in the ranks. It was a kind of secret which

we all knew and were too clever to tell; only the Negroes didn't know it.

And really it was like watching a flock of cattle to see the long

column, a mile or two miles of armed men, flowing peacefully up the

road, while the great white birds drifted over them in the opposite

direction, glittering like scraps of Paper.

(from Reading for Rhetoric, by Caroline Shrodes,

Clifford A. Josephson, and James R. Wilson)

NOTES

1. Orwell: George Orwell was the pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair

(1903-50), an English writer who at one time served with the Indian

Imperial Police in Burma. He fought in the Spanish Civil War, an

experience he recorded in Homage to Catalonia. His novels include

Down and Out in Paris and London ; Burmese Days ; Coming up for Air ; A

Clergyman' s Daughter ; Keep the Aspidistra Flying; Animal Farm; and

1984. The last two novels vilify socialist society and

communism. Among his well known essays are: Shooting an Elephant ; A

Hanging ; Marrakech ; and Politics and the English Language.

2. Moorish: Moors, mixed Arabs and Berbers, and inhabitants of

Morocco. They set up a Moorish empire from the end of the 8th

century to the 12th century: by 12th century the empire included

North Africa to the borders of Egypt, as well as Mohammedan Spain.

3. Mon vieux: a French phrase meaning, "my old fellow (friend)"

4. Distressed Area: area where there is widespread unemployment,

poverty, etc., a slum area.

5. Foreign Legionnaires: France organized a foreign legion shortly

after the conquest of Algiers in 1830, enlisting recruits who were not

French subjects. Spain had a foreign legion, up till the revolution in

Morocco, and Holland in the Dutch East Indies.

6. fifteen-hands: unit of measurement, especially for the height of

horses; a hand, the breadth of the human palm, is now usually taken to

be 4 inches.