高級(jí)英語(yǔ)Lesson_2_(BooK_2)_Marrakech_課文內(nèi)容

1、高級(jí)英語(yǔ) Lesson_2_(BooK_2)_Marrakech_ 課文內(nèi)容MarrakechGeorge OrwellAs 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.The little crowd of mourners - all men and boys, nowomen-threaded their way across the market place between t

2、hepiles 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 offour friends. When th

3、e friends get to the burying-ground they hack anoblong hole a foot or two deep, dump the body in it and fling overit a little of the dried-up, lumpy earth, which is like broken brick. Nogravestone, no name, no identifying mark of any kind. The burying- ground is merely a huge waste of hummocky earth

4、, like aderelict building-lot. After a month or two no one can even be certain where his own relatives are buried.When you walk through a town like this - two hundredthousand inhabitants of whom at least twenty thousand own literally nothing except the rags they stand up in- when you see how thepeop

5、le live, and still more how easily they die, it is always difficult to believe that you are walking among human beings. All colonialempires are in reality founded upon this fact. The people have brownfaces-besides, there are so many of them! Are they really the sameflesh as your self? Do they even h

6、ave names? Or are they merely a kind of undifferentiated brown stuff, about as individual as bees orcoral insects? They rise out of the earth， they sweat and starve forafew years, and then they sink back into the nameless mounds of the graveyard and nobody notices that they are gone. And even thegra

7、ves 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.I was feeding one of the gazelles in the publi

8、c gardens.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 wasfeeding seemed to know that this thought was in my mind, for thoughit took the piece of bread I was ho

9、lding out it obviously did not likeme. 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.An Arab navvy working on t

10、he path nearby lowered his heavyhoe 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 thisbefore. Finally he said shyly in French: 1 could eat some of that bread.I t

11、ore off a piece and he stowed it gratefully in some secret place under his rags. This man is an employee of the municipality.When you go through the Jewish Quarters you gather someidea of what the medieval ghettoes were probably like. Under their Moorish Moorishrulers the Jews were only allowed to o

12、wn land in certain restricted areas, and after centuries of this kind of treatment they have ceased to bother about overcrowding. Many of the streetsare a good deal less than six feet wide, the houses are completely windowless, and sore-eyed children cluster everywhere inunbelievable numbers, like c

13、louds of flies. Down the centre of the street there is generally running a little river of urine.In the bazaar huge families of Jews, all dressed in the long black robe and little black skull-cap, are working in dark fly-infestedbooths that look like caves. A carpenter sits crosslegged at a prehisto

14、ric lathe, turning chairlegs at lightning speed. He works thelathe 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 p

15、arts of the job.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 somew

16、here 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, andevery one of them looks on a cigarette as a more or le

17、ss impossible luxury.As the Jews live in self-contained communities they follow thesame 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

18、. As a matter of fact there are thirteen thousand of them, all living in the space of a few acres. A good job Hitletwasnt here. Perhaps he was on his way, however. You hear the usual dark rumours about Jews, not only from the Arabs but from the poorerEuropeans.Yes vieux mon vieux, they took my job a

19、way from me andgave 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.But, I said, isnt it a fact that the average Jew is a labourerworking for about a penny an hour?Ah, thats only for show! They re all mo

20、ney lenders really.They re cunning, the Jews.In just the same way, a couple of hundred years ago, poor old women used to be burned for witchcraft when they could not evenwork enough magic to get themselves a square meal. square mealAll people who work with their hands are partly invisible, andthe mo

21、re important the work they do, the less visible they are. Still, awhite skin is always fairly conspicuous. In northern Europe, whenyou 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 dont

22、 even see him. I have noticed thisagain and again. In a tropical landscape ones eye takes ineverything except the human beings. It takes in the dried-up soil, theprickly pear, the palm tree and the distant mountain, but it alwaysmisses the peasant hoeing at his patch. He is the same colour as the ea

23、rth, and a great deal less interesting to look at.It is only because of this that the starved countries of Asia andAfrica are accepted as tourist resorts. No one would think of running cheap trips to the Distressed Areas. But where the humanbeings have brown skins their poverty is simply not noticed

24、. Whatdoes 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 couldprobably live there for years without noticing that for nine-tenths ofthe people the reality of life is a

25、n endless back-breaking struggle towring a little food out of an eroded soil.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. Neverthe

26、less a good deal of it is cultivated, withfrightful 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

27、 stalk instead ofreaping 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 ones 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

28、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. Thepeasants possess no narrows, they merely plough the soil several times over in different directions

29、, 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 therare rainstorms there is never enough water. A long the edges of the fields channels are hacked out to a depth of thirty or forty

30、 feet to get at the tiny trickles which run through the subsoil.Every afternoon a file of very old women passes down theroad 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 co

31、mmunities that the women, when they get beyond a certain age, shrink to the size ofchildren. 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 herhand. She an

32、swered 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 tosay as a beast of burden. When a famil

33、y is travelling it is quite usual to see a father and a grown-up son riding ahead on donkeys, and anold woman following on foot, carrying the baggage.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 hobbl

34、ed past the house with their firewood, and though they had registered themselves on my eyeballs I cannot truly say thatI had seen them. Firewood was passing - that was how I saw it. Itwas only that one day I happened to be walking behind them, and the curious up-and-down motion of a load of wood dre

35、w my attention to the human being beneath it. Then for the first time I noticed the poorold earth-coloured bodies, bodies reduced to bones and leatheryskin, 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 donke

36、ys and was infuriated by it. There is no question that thedonkeys 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, andvery often its packsaddle is not taken off its ba

37、ck for weekstogether. 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 bridleor halter . After a dozen years of devoted work it suddenly dropsdead, whereupon its master tips it into the ditch and the village do

38、gs have torn its guts out before it is cold.21 This kind of thing makes ones blood boil, whereas- on thewhole - 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 gal

39、led back, but it is generally owing to some kind of accident if one even notices the old woman under her load of sticks.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, w

40、inding up the road with a clumping of boots and a clatter of iron wheels.They were Senegalese, the blackest Negroes in Africa, so black that sometimes it is difficult to see whereabouts on theirnecks the hair begins. Their splendid bodies were hidden in reach-me-down khaki uniforms, their feet squas

41、hed into boots that looked like blocks of wood, and every tin hat seemed to be a coupleof 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.As they went past, a tall, ve

42、ry 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, noteven inquisitive. It was the shy, wide-eyed Negro look, which actuallyis a look of profound respect. I saw how it was. This wretched

43、boy, who is a French citizen and has therefore been dragged from the forest to scrub floors and catch syphilis in garrison towns, actuallyhas feelings of reverence before a white skin. He has been taught that the white race are his masters, and he still believes it.But there is one thought which eve

44、ry white man (and in this connection it doesnt matter twopence if he calls himself a socialist) thinks when he sees a black army marching past. How much longercan we go on kidding these people? How long before they turn their guns in the other direction?It was curious really. Every white man there h

45、ad this thought stowed somewhere or other in his mind. I had it, so had the otheronlookers, so had the officers on their sweating chargers and thewhite 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 didnt know it. And really it was like watching a flock of cattle to see the longcolumn, a mile or two miles of armed men, flowing peacefully up the road, while the great white birds drifted over them in the opposite