sparrows like a flat limber stick whipped by an idle boy, and the rank smell offemale old flesh long embattled in virginity while the wan haggard face watchedhim above the faint triangle of lace at wrists and throat from the too tallchair in which she resembled a crucified child; and the voice not ceasing butvanishing into and then out of the long intervals like a stream, a tricklerunning from patch to patch of dried sand, and the ghost mused with shadowydocility as if it were the voice which he haunted where a more fortunate onewould have had a house. Out of quiet thunderclap he would abrupt(man-horse-demon) upon a scene peaceful and decorous as a schoolprize watercolor, faint sulphur-reek still in hair clothes and beard, with grouped behindhim his band of wild niggers like beasts half tamed to walk upright like men,in attitudes wild and reposed, and manacled among them the French architectwith his air grim, haggard, and taller-ran. Immobile, bearded, and hand palmlifted the horseman sat; behind him the wild blacks and the captive architecthuddled quietly, carrying in bloodless paradox the shovels and picks and axesof peaceful conquest. Then in the long unamaze Quentin seemed to watch themoverrun suddenly the hundred square miles of tranquil and astonished earth anddrag house and formal gardens violently out of the soundless Nothing and clapthem down like cards upon a table beneath the up-palm immobile and pontific,creating the Sutpen's Hundred, the Be Sutpen's Hundred like the oldentime BeLight. Then hearing would reconcile and he would seem to listen to two separateQuentins now the Quentin Compson preparing for Harvard in the South, the deepSouth dead since 1865 and people with garrulous outraged baffled ghosts,listening, having to listen, to one of the ghosts which had refused to liestill even longer than most had, telling him about old ghost-times; and theQuentin Compson who was still too young to deserve yet to be a ghost, but nevertheless