about three o'clock
Over his head the blue circles of ominous uncharted suns , of unnumbered centres of fire , revolved interminably before his eyes as though he were lying constantly exposed to the hot light and in a state of feverish coma . At seven in the morning something phantasmal , something almost absurdly unreal that he knew was his mortal body , went out with seven other prisoners and two guards to work on the camp roads . One day they loaded and unloaded quantities of gravel , spread it , raked it -- the next day they worked with huge barrels of red-hot tar , flooding the gravel with black , shining pools of molten heat . At night , locked up in the guard-house , he would lie without thought , without courage to compass thought , staring at the irregular beams of the ceiling overhead until about three o'clock , when he would slip into a broken , troubled sleep . During the work hours he labored with uneasy haste , attempting , as the day bore toward the sultry Mississippi sunset , to tire himself physically so that in the evening he might sleep deeply from utter exhaustion ... . Then one afternoon in the second week he had a feeling that two eyes were watching him from a place a few feet beyond one of the guards . This aroused him to a sort of terror .