“Yes, for eight months of the year, I see nobody, literally nobody. It is only during the winter that strangers come here.”
“Isn't it lonesome?”
“A little, but you get used to it.”
“What do you do during the hottest months?”
“As near nothing as possible.”
“How hot is it?”
“Sometimes the thermometer goes to 120° Fahrenheit. It stays a long time at 100°. The worst of it is that the nights are almost as hot as the days.”
“How do you exist?”
“I keep very quiet, don't write, don't read anything that requires the least thought. Seldom go out, never in the daytime. In the early morning I sit a while on the verandah, and about ten o'clock get into a big bath-tub, which I have on the ground-floor, and stay in it nearly all day, reading some very mild novel, and smoking the weakest tobacco. In the evening I find it rather cooler outside the house than in. A white man can't do anything here in the summer.”
I did not say it to Mr. Smith, but I should scarcely like to live in a country where one is obliged to be in water half the year, like a pelican. We can have, however, from his experience some idea what this basin must have been in summer, when its area was a crowded city, upon which the sun, reverberated from the incandescent limestone hills, beat in unceasing fervor.