Presently she
rises anew and proceeds five or six paces for no imaginable
reason--collapses; falls, quite abruptly, on her side. There she lies,
flat, like a playing-card.
A sinister aimlessness pervades the actions of those that move at all.
The shadow of death is upon these creatures in the scorching sunshine.
They stare at columns of polished granite, at a piece of weed, at one
another, as though they had never seen such things before. They totter
about on tip-toe; they yawn and forget to shut their mouths. Here is
one, stretching out a hind leg in a sustained cramp; another is
convulsed with nervous twitchings; another scratches the earth in a kind
of mechanical trance. One would say she was preparing a grave for
herself. The saddest of all is an old warrior with mighty jowl and a
face that bears the scars of a hundred fights. One eye has been lost in
some long-forgotten encounter. Now they walk over him, kittens and all,
and tread about his head, as if he were a hillock of earth, while his
claws twitch resentfully with rage or pain. Too ill to rise!
Most of them are thus stretched out blankly, in a faint. Are they
suffering? Hungry or thirsty? [23] I believe they are past troubling
about such things. It is time to die. They know it....
"L'albergo dei gatti," says a cheery voice at my side--some countryman,
who has also discovered Trajan's Forum to be one of the sights of Rome.
"The cats' hotel. But," he adds, "I see no restaurant attached to it.
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