Plague - Apr 09

However, we may here anticipate a little and describe the ________(情况/状况/境遇) to which we came in the final phase.

The first step taken was to bury the dead by night, which obviously permitted a more ________(简单化的/迅速且没有过多仪式的) procedure. The bodies were piled into ambulances in larger and larger numbers.

Then a municipal employee had an idea that greatly helped the harassed authorities; he advised them to ________(利用) ________(有轨电车) running along the coastal road, which was now unused.

Shortly afterward, however, it became necessary to find new space and to ________(朝某方向开始前行/出发) in a new direction. By a special urgency measure the denizens of ________(永恒的馈赠，委婉地表示死亡) were evicted from their graves and the exhumed remains dispatched to the crematorium. And soon the plague victims likewise had to ________(最终只能被火化).

Thereafter only when a strong wind was blowing did a faint, sickly odor coming from the east remind them that they were living under a new order and that the plague fires were ________(每天晚上都在造成破坏[意译为焚烧尸体]).

He knew, too, that if there was aother rise in the death-rate, no organization, however efficient, could ________(面对/经受得起).

The corpses were ________(倾倒) pell-mell into the pits and had hardly ________(停止晃动/稳稳地落地) when spadefuls of quicklime began to sear their faces and the earth covered them indistinctively, in holes dug steadily deeper as time went on.

In this connection the narrator is well aware how regrettable is his inability to record at this point something of a really spectacular order—________(一些英雄壮举) or memorable deed like those that thrill us in the chronicles of the past.

In the memories of those who ________(度过/经受过) them, the grim days of plague do not stand out like vivid flames, ravenous and inextinguishable, beaconing a troubled sky, but rather like the slow, deliberate progress of some monstrous thing ________(在它的道路上摧毁一切).