' ... old pictures of the plague: Athens, a charnel-house reeking to heaven and deserted even by the birds; Chinese towns cluttered up with victims silent in their agony; the convicts at Marseille pilling rotting corpses into pits; the building of the Great Wall in Provence to fend off the furious plague wind; the damp, putrefying pallets stuck to the Constantinople lazar-house, where the patients were hauled up from their beds with hooks; the carnival of masked doctors at the Black Death; men and women copulating in the cemeteries of Milan; cartloads of dead bodies rumbling through London's ghoul-haunted darkness...'
Albert Camus, The Plague
