“The City of Dreadful Night” paints a gritty, dark picture of a hot summer night within a walled city in the Orient. The narrator steps over sleeping people which mimic corpses—and vividly depicts what he sees, feels, and hears in this death-like city. Also included in this collection are “The Giridih Coal-Fields” and “Among the Railway Folk, ” reports from a trip Kipling made to the East India Railway Company’s coal fields and headquarters.
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Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), called the “prophet of British imperialism” by George Orwell, became a pastmaster of the short story, as well as a tireless poet. The first English writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature (1907), his fiction and poetry include such works as The Jungle Book, The Light That Failed, and “Gunga Din.”