#huntergracchus

Soon he found a good-sized pleasure punt drawn up on the bank, but in and around it was an awful tableau - five dead men, nearly naked, badly burned, who must have expired more or less all at once, for they were in attitudes which suggested they had been working together to push the boat down into the river. Mr Tanimoto lifted them away from the boat, and as he did so, he experienced such horror at disturbing the dead - preventing them, he momentarily felt, from launching their craft and going on their ghostly way - that he said out loud, "Please forgive me for taking this boat. I must use it for others who are alive."