Requiem for London• 197city of Oran, Dr. Rieux hearkens back to the Athenians who had brought
their dead to the water’s edge after nightfall to give them a dignified burial in
funeral pyres. There was not enough room for the dead, and so the living
fought each other with torches rather than abandon their dead to a watery
grave. Dr. Rieux feels strangely comforted by this contested scene: “The red
glow of the pyres mirrored on a wine-dark, slumberous sea, battling torches
... whirling sparks across the darkness, and thick, fetid smoke rising toward
the watchful sky.” Could future Algerians experience this anguishing brush
with destiny? “Yes,” he muses, “it was not beyond the bound of possibility.”^42
In Pepys’ London as in Thucydides’ Athens and Camus’s Algeria, some
people responded to this fright—this night of the mind—by shaping simple
rituals to deny the victory of death. The urge for communal survival was ev-
ident among the ascendant Anglicans, the persecuted Quakers, and the other
outlawed religious sects of the day. Young and old, poor and rich, male and
female were affected by this spirit, including some who suffered the most
and others who were waiting out the capital’s visitation in the country.