aquellos pensamientos lo bastante hondos como para
About the soldiers hung the Arabs: gravely-gazing men from another sphere. My crooked duty had banished me among them for two years. Tonight I was nearer to them than to the troops, and I resented it, as shameful.
The intruding contrast mixed with longing for home, to sharpen my faculties and make fertile my distaste, till not merely did I see the unlikeness of race, and hear the unlikeness of language, but I learned to pick between their smells:
- the heavy, standing, curdled sourness of dried sweat in cotton, over the Arab crowds;
- and the feral smell of English soldiers: that hot pissy aura of thronged men in woollen clothes: a tart pungency, breath-catching, ammoniacal: a fervent fermenting naphtha-smell.