out of the window? What had he lost? Why was that idiot sitting there, in a dirty grey suit, and trousers baggy at the knees, with one bicycle clip, in his long, long baggy grey jacket, and grey cloth cap, and brown boots, with his thick fleshy grey face, from which three upper teeth, perhaps the very three teeth, were missing, all on one side, and thick neck, saying, every few minutes to anyone who came in: "I'm watching you." "I can see you..." "You won't escape me."--"If you only kept quiet, Claus, no one'd know you were crazy..".. That was the time too, in the storm country, when "the lightning is peeling the poles, Mr Firmin, and biting the wires, sir--you can taste it afterwards too, in the water, pure sulphur,"--that at four o'clock each afternoon, preceded, out of the adjacent cemetery, by the gravedigger--sweating, heavy-footed, bowed, long-jawed and trembling, and carrying his special tools of death--he would come to this same tavern to meet Mr Quattras, the Negro bookie from Codrington, in the Barbados. "I'm a race-track man and I was brought up with whites, so the blacks don't like me." Mr. Quattras, grinning and sad, feared deportation... But that battle against death had been won. And he had saved Mr Quattras. That very night, had it been?--with a heart like a cold brazier standing by a railway platform among meadowsweet wet with dew: they are beautiful and terrifying, these shadows of cars that sweep down fences, and sweep zebra-like across the grass path in the avenue of dark oaks under the moon: a single shadow, like an umbrella on rails, travelling down a picket fence; portents of doom, of the heart failing... Gone. Eaten up in reverse by night. And the moon gone. C'était pendant l'horreur d'une profonde nuit. And the deserted cemetery in the starlight, forsaken by the grave-digger, drunk now, wandering home across the fields--"I can dig a grave in three hours if they'll let me,"--the cemetery in the dappled moonlight of a single street lamp, the deep thick grass, the towering obelisk lost in the Milky Way. Jull, it said on the monument. What had the Station Master said? The dead. Do they sleep? Why should they, when we cannot? Mais tout dort, et l'armée, et les vents, et Neptune. And he had placed the poor ragged cornflowers reverently on a neglected grave... That was Oakville.--But Oaxaca or Oakville, what difference? Or between a tavern that opened at four o'clock in the afternoon, and one that opened (save on holidays) at four o'clock in the morning?... "I ain't telling you the word of a lie but once I had a whole vault dug up for $100 and sent to Cleveland!"
A corpse will be transported by express...
Oozing alcohol from every pore, the Consul stood at the open door of the Salón Ofélia. How sensible to have had a mescal. How sensible! For it was the right, the sole drink to have under the circumstances. Moreover he had not only proved to himself he was not afraid of it, he was now fully awake, fully sober again, and well able to cope with anything that might come his way. But for this slight continual twitching and hopping within his field of vision, as of innumerable sand fleas, he might have told himself he hadn't had a drink for months. The only thing wrong with him, he was too hot.
A natural waterfall crashing down into a sort of reservoir built on two levels--he found the sight less cooling than grotesquely suggestive of some organized ultimate sweat; the lower level made a pool where Hugh and Yvonne were still not yet swimming. The water on the turbulent upper level raced over an artificial falls beyond which, becoming a swift stream, it wound through thick jungle to spill down a much larger natural cascada out of sight. After that it dispersed, he recalled, lost its identity, dribbled, at various places, into the barranca. A path followed the stream through the jungle and at one place another path branched off to the right which went to Parián: and the Farolito. Though the first path led you to rich cantina country too. God knows why. Once, perhaps, in hacienda days, Tomalín had held some