The brown, dead leaves rustled into little tawny hillocks, behind protecting logs and rocks.

Frequently those took on the shape of long, narrow mounds as if they covered the graves of some ill-fated being, who like themselves, had fallen to the earth to rot in dull obscurity.

The clear little streams that in Summer-time murmured musically down the slopes, under canopies of nodding roses and fragrant sweet-brier, were now turbid torrents, brawling like churls drunken with much wine, and tearing out with savage wantonness their banks, matted with the roots of the blue violets, and the white-flowered puccoon.
Scattered over the mountain-side were fatigue-parties engaged in hunting up the dead, and burying them in shallow graves, hastily dug in clay so red that it seemed as if saturated with the blood shed the day before.
The buriers thrust their hands into the pockets of the dead with the flinching, nauseated air of men touching filth, and took from the garments seeping with water and blood, watches, letters, ambrotypes, money and trinkets, some of which they studied to gain a clue to the dead man's identity, some retained as souvenirs, but threw the most back into the grave with an air of loathing.

The faces of the dead with their staring eyes and open mouths and long, lank hair, cloyed with the sand and mud thrown up by the beating rain, looked indescribably repulsive.
The buriers found it better to begin their work by covering the features with a cap or a broad-brimmed hat.

It was difficult for the coarsest of them to fling a spadeful of dank clay directly upon the wide-open eyes and seemingly-speaking mouth.
"Those fellows' souls," said Kent, regarding the corpses, "seem to have left their earthly houses in such haste that they forgot to close the doors and windows after them.