All 3 Uses

abject
in
A Bend in the River
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Now, so quickly, they had become abject.†
p. 76.6 *

abject = extreme
As for the starveling rebels of our region, they soon began to reappear in the town, more starved and abject, their blackened rags hanging on them, men who only a few weeks before had thought they had found a fetish powerful enough to cause the guns of their enemies to bend and to turn bullets to water.†
p. 80.7
And in that I was like the ragged Africans who were so abject in the town we serviced.†
p. 107.8

Definitions:

(1) (abject)
extreme (in a negative sense such as misery, hopelessness, submissiveness, cruelty, or cowardice)
(2) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)