O! intimate, loquacious wind! It told epic tales of black men, the salt of adventure seasoning the marrow in their bones, in bateaux (the flat-bottomed curses) speeding, nugget laden, down the tacabah-paved river—suddenly becoming songless!
Ovah danger, danger, danger
Danger, danger, danger, danger
Rocks an' Fall—!
You Mistah Tacabah! A sea lion, a sea cow, a shark? No! Great big slices of timber fastened, growing in the river! Deep-rooted, they were animals—groveling in the bowels of the unsettled stream. And Tacabah, the perpendicular beast, had eyes and ears, feet and heads. And tacabah could butt. On a starless night, he, the master of the river's fate, the hairy prowler of its incalculable depths, usually got on the war path. How easy it was for him! All a headlong bateau, oared by a lot of drunken gold diggers, need do was touch it—it was hardly necessary to jam it—and tacabah'd get the laugh on bateau! Over it'd go—at tacabah's jerky butt—heading for the eely monster's bowels, planted deep in the roots of eternity.
Ovah danger, danger, danger,
Danger, danger, danger, danger,
Rocks an' Fall—!
The moon, rambling about in the torrid sky, now and then gleamed on something Seenie carried on her head. It was a skillet filled with soup. Dozens of Cayenne peppers, hot as the water blazing in an equatorial sea, had gone into its making. Only throats of the purest steel were able to give passage to it. It was ghastly stuff. Eating it at night, Seenie'd bring heat to bear on heat. After a draught she'd light the kerosene lamp, discard the chimney, and open her mouth over the flames till her throat cooled. It was a rite rivaling the starkest brujerial act. In the skillet of red terra cotta, was Water Spout's portion of the flaming broth.
All the thwarted sounds of creation rose to a mighty murmur in the obscuring night. Deep in the thicket four-legged beasts stalked. There was baying. Sheep, torn by a species of wolf hounds on the Coast, remained silent. But the dogs were less cultivated, and there was deadlier tearing done.
Along the road iguana, the sparkle in their eyes jeweling the tropic night, pursued shy, petty quests. And from the hedge came the silken slither of snakes about to lather with foam and strike some legless sheep or ox left by the mutinous pack.
The words of a song sung by the peasants of the East Coast rose on Seenie's melodious lips:
Minnie, Minnie, come yah!
Salam-bo come yah!
Salam-Matanja, come yah!
Le' Quackah-Tanyah, 'tan' dey!
Abruptly she left the coral road and unerringly stopped, in spite of the branching of leaf, at the cabin rising a little ways in.