Public-domain ebook
The Rake's Progress
Language: en216 downloads on Project Gutenberg
Subjects
In: Poetry
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #31515.
The opening · free to read
Pondicherry
Chess pieces resting upon the jade mantle piece see sampans move quietly thru warm night, rich bundles of bougainvillea crowd market squares where deck chairs extend to the Persian Gulf.
Leisured gentlemen finger walking canes, hold eyelids thick as goblets, sharp tridents beside private lairs.
Skin in puffy whiteness bulges under lamp's white glare, becomes copra gathered miles from Pondicherry, sesame oil in rotting casks.
And the Indian heat, closing with certitude akin to the trance of the snake charmer, holds his flute poised with the Bengali lancer riding a slow crop over the prostrate polo ball.
How, with all the wallow of thick muck making suction noises and the teams in relays searching nightly with baited hounds, do you pull free?
Your bamboo pole knows every ploy but a slender craft ill-equipped to sparring blows from every quarter the undergrowth necessitates.
The closeness of the clammy night heaved about like so much rotting fruit will draw the ants ... devouring like that abundance of cold yellow eye-- the firefly swarms that mock your heavy steel machete arm.
Across the drift of darkness and the insect life you bat in swarms, the ultimate danger is not in the cayman giant or his reptilian cousin named of copper wire, the anaconda, or even mindless holes, thick black ooze that throttles a victim ... but two legged form coming, searching ... a spectre on hind quarters with a bolo knife stepping free of that beaded circle, the inner camp.
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