It turned left, and passed through an open door.
I found myself in the wet sunless air of morning.
To the right it hurried, following the wall of the building. I pursued it
mechanically. At the corner, which I had seen from the window upstairs,
the barbed-wire fence eight feet in height began. The thing paused,
produced a key and unlocked a gate. The first three or four feet of wire
swung inward. He entered. I after him.
In a flash the gate was locked behind me, and I was following along a
wall at right angles to the first. I strode after the thing. A moment
before I had been walking in a free world: now I was again a prisoner.
The sky was still over me, the clammy morning caressed me; but walls of
wire and stone told me that my instant of freedom had departed. I was in
fact traversing a lane no wider than the gate; on my left, barbed-wire
separated me from the famous _cour_ in which _les femmes se promenent_--a
rectangle about 50 feet deep and 200 long, with a stone wall at the
further end of it and otherwise surrounded by wire;--on my right, grey
sameness of stone, the _ennui_ of the regular and the perpendicular, the
ponderous ferocity of silence....
I had taken automatically some six or eight steps in pursuit of the
fleeing spectre when, right over my head, the grey stone curdled with a
female darkness; the hard and the angular softening in a putrescent
explosion of thick wriggling laughter.
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