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Marrakech
馬拉喀什見聞
George Orwell
喬治奧威爾
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.
一具尸體抬過，成群的蒼蠅從飯館的餐桌上甕嗡嗡而起追逐過去，但幾分鐘過后又非了回來。
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.
一支人數不多的送葬隊伍--其中老少盡皆男性，沒有一個女的--沿著集貿市場，從一堆堆石榴攤子以及出租汽車和駱駝中間擠道而行，一邊走著一邊悲痛地重復著一支短促的哀歌。蒼蠅之所以群起追逐是因為在這個地方死人的尸首從不裝進棺木，只是用一塊破布裹著放在一個草草做成的木頭架子上，有四個朋友抬著送葬。朋友們到了安葬場后，便在地上挖出一個一二英尺深的長方形坑，將尸首往坑里一倒。再扔一些像碎磚頭一樣的日、干土塊。不立墓碑，不留姓名，什么識別標志都沒有。墳場只不過是一片土丘林立的荒野，恰似一片已廢棄不用的建筑場地。一兩個月過后，就誰也說不準自己的親人葬于何處了。
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!
當你穿行也這樣的城鎮--其居民20萬中至少有2萬是除開一身聊以蔽體的破衣爛衫之外完全一無所有--當你看到那些人是如何生活，又如何動輒死亡時，你永遠難以相信自己是行走在人類之中。實際上，這是所有的殖民帝國賴以建立的基礎。這里的人都有一張褐色的臉，而且，人數書如此之多!
