Whether he can walk alone or not, they will take him away and hang him.
And if he should offer resistance, struggle or lie down on the ground--they will overpower him, lift him, bind him and carry him, bound, to the gallows.

And the fact that this machine-like work will be performed over him by human beings like himself, lent to them a new, extraordinary and ominous aspect--they seemed to him like ghosts that came to him for this one purpose, or like automatic puppets on springs.
They would seize him, take him, carry him, hang him, pull him by the feet.

They would cut the rope, take him down, carry him off and bury him.
From the first day of his imprisonment the people and life seemed to him to have turned into an incomprehensibly terrible world of phantoms and automatic puppets.

Almost maddened with fear, he attempted to picture to himself that human beings had tongues and that they could speak, but he could not--they seemed to him to be mute.

He tried to recall their speech, the meaning of the words that people used in their relations with one another--but he could not.