But Grim shouted something about taking away for burial the corpse of a man who had died of small-pox.

The man on the wall commanded us to Allah's mercy and warned us to beware lest we, too, catch that dreaded plague.
"Inshallah!" Grim answered.

Then he summoned our men from the moat.
They passed up Abdul Ali, dragging him feet-first again with one man keeping a clenched fist ready to strike him in the mouth in case he should forget that corpses don't cry out.

He looked like a corpse half-cold, as they carried him jerkily along a track that roughly followed the line of the wall.

I don't suppose that anything ever looked more like an Arab funeral procession than we did.