Men with shaggy beards and hair all entangled and unkempt, with fierce eyes and lowering glances; women with faces that unsexed them.

There were despair and desperation and utter recklessness in the air, in the attitude, in the hearts of these people.
And Paul had worked among them for years.

The sight would have been heart-breaking had Paul Howard Alexis been the sort of man to admit the possibility of a broken heart.

All that he had done had been frustrated by the wall of heartless bureaucracy against which he had pitched his single strength.

There was no visible progress.