In him, too, the sap was rising, the sap of his two-and-twenty years, but with a feverishness that exhausted the source from which it sprang, and in the end this terrible renascence would have brought him to the verge of death.
Anamalis fobil! How rapidly this spring advanced!... June was scarcely over, and already, under the influence of deadly heat, in an atmosphere no longer endurable, the leaves were turning yellow, the plants were dying, and the sere grasses drooped earthwards....
XXXV
Anamalis fobil! ... There are in hot countries certain fruits of harsh and bitter flavour—such as the gourous of Senegal—that are detestable to the palate in our cool latitudes, but which, out there, appeal to the taste in special conditions of thirst or ill-health. You may have a passionate craving for them, and they may seem to you curiously delicious.
It was the same with that little creature with her shock of black sheep’s wool, her body of sculptured marble, and her glittering eyes, already fully aware of what they asked of Jean, yet downcast in his presence with a childish presence of timid modesty.
This highly-flavoured fruit of the Soudan was precociously ripened by the tropical spring, bursting with poisonous juices, rife with morbid voluptuousness, febrile and foreign.
XXXVI
Anamalis fobil!
Jean had dressed for the evening hastily, almost frenziedly.