In his upturned eyes, and along
the polished surface of his lean body black and immobile, the stars
were reflected, creating an illusion of themselves who are illusions.
The roofs of the congested trees, writhing in some kind of agony
private and eternal, made tenebrous and shifty silhouettes against the
sky, like shapes cut out of black paper by a maniac who pushes them
with his thumb this way and that, irritably, on a concave surface of
blue steel. Resin oozed unseen from the upper branches to the trunks
swathed in creepers that clutched and interlocked with tendrils
venomous, frantic and faint. Down below, by force of habit, the
lush herbage went through the farce of growth--that farce old and
screaming, whose trite end is decomposition.
Within the hut the form of the white man, corpulent and pale, was
covered with a mosquito-net that was itself illusory like everything
else, only more so. Flying squadrons of mosquitoes inside its meshes
flickered and darted over him, working hard, but keeping silence so
as not to excite him from sleep. Cohorts of yellow ants disputed him
against cohorts of purple ants, the two kinds slaying one another
in thousands. The battle was undecided when suddenly, with no such
warning as it gives in some parts of the world, the sun blazed up over
the horizon, turning night into day, and the insects vanished back
into their camps.
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