The Power and the Glory

by Graham Greene

Then they took him away. Now that they had caught him they treated him in a friendly way, poking fun at his attempt to escape, except the Red Shirt whose shot he had spoiled. He couldn’t find any answer to their jokes: self-preservation lay across his brain like a horrifying obsession. When would they discover who he really was? When would he meet the half-caste, or the lieutenant who had interrogated him already? They moved in a bunch slowly up the hill to the plaza. A rifle-butt grounded outside the station as they came in. A small lamp fumed against the dirty whitewashed wall; in the courtyard hammocks swung, bunched around sleeping bodies like the nets in which poultry are tied. ‘You can sit down,’ one of the men said, and pushed him in a comradely way towards a bench. Everything now seemed irrevocable; the sentry passed back and forth outside the door, and in the courtyard among the hammocks the ceaseless murmur of sleep went on.