From the houses nearby, from the streets close to the wall, issued men and women drawn by news of the arrival of the Greek. They surrounded him, they questioned him; all wished to be first to receive the news to scatter it through the city. Defending himself from them, Actæon gazed with horror at their lean, yellow faces, their earthy skin outlining the prominent sutures of their skulls; their sunken eyes in their black orbits shining with an unearthly light, like fading stars reflected in the depths of a well, and their emaciated arms, which creaked like canes as they moved them with nervous emotion.
He started onward, escorted by the multitude, preceded by boys absolutely nude, horrible to look at, with skins ready to break from the pressure of their ribs outlined one above the other, with enormously large heads above their fleshless necks. They staggered painfully, as if their tottering, thread-like limbs could not bear the weight of their bodies; some, to lessen their suffering, dragged themselves along the ground, lacking the strength to stand.
Actæon beheld a deserted corpse lying in a corner, the face covered with strange flies which glinted in the sunshine with metallic reflections. Farther on at a cross street, some women were trying to raise to his feet a naked youth beside whom lay his abandoned bow. The Greek noted with horror his sunken, inward-curving abdomen, a palpitating whirlpool of skin between the protruding hip bones which threatened to burst from the body. It was a mummy still showing a flickering spark of life in the eyes, opening and shutting its parched and blackened lips as if feeding on the unnourishing air.
He continued on his way down the lengthy streets, but no more people joined the group. The doors of many houses remained closed, despite the clamor of the crowd, and Actæon contrasted this solitude with the great multitude of people during the early days of the siege. Dead dogs lying in the gullies, as emaciated as the people themselves, polluted the atmosphere. At street crossings lay skeletons of horses and mules, clean and white, holding not even a scrap of flesh to satisfy the repugnant insects buzzing in the atmosphere of the doomed city.