8
THE WHITE SNAKE
I
On the banks of a bilgy lamahau, the eeliest street-stream in Bordeaux, a row of Negro peasant lodgings warmly slept. It was a vile, backward crescent reeking in brats and fiendish lusts. Cocabe among its inkish rice-growers extended to gorillas sentenced to the dungeons of Surinam, Portuguese settlers who'd gone black, Chinks pauperized in the Georgetown fire of '05, and Calcutta coolies mixing rotie at dusk to the chorus of crickets and crapeaux moaning in the black watery gut.
The dawn rose a dewy crimson, and a blood-curdling sound polluted the vapory silences of a Negro lodging.
"Murdah! Police! Warlah! Hole 'im! Miss Ewin', tek 'e arf me."
Fetid black snorers rolled restively, clawed, dug at bugs or itching veins rising bluely on bare languid bodies, as if to say: don't worry. It's nothing. Nothing but some Hindu coolie, after the evening's rotie debauch, to the roll of goat drums, outside, on the low lamahau earth, severing the head of some jewel-laden, thirteen-year-old mate, the third on a string of murdered conquests.