All those trying hours whilst I was frozen and yet
was in a living fire, as you may say, on account of that
swarm of crawlers, that same unanswerable question
kept
circling and circling through my tired head: How
do people
stand this miserable armor? How have they
managed to stand it all these generations? How can
they sleep at night for dreading the tortures of next
day?
When the morning came at last, I was in a bad
enough plight: seedy, drowsy, fagged, from want of
sleep; weary from thrashing around, famished from
long fasting; pining for a bath, and to get rid of the
animals;