'I was planning.'
'About us?'
When we're home. What we'll do; where'll we go; what we'll see.'
'Never anything stranger than this,' she nodded towards the shore.
Sheer red cliffs loomed above them. Like futurist painting, violent colours lay in slabs. A streak of faint green sky topped the sandstone wall off which blazed the refulgence of the declining sun; a strip of beach slid a tongue of silver between that fiery barrier and the deepening blue of the Lake.
'Pity you can't paint, Dick. Call it "Drink of Water in Hell," or something bright.'
'The village spoils it. Victorian almost.'
The village, which contrasted the pacificism of man with the violence of nature, stretched its single row of oblong huts under the compact shade of gray-green mango-trees. Their shadow fell black on the ragged thatch which fined from the chocolate colour of the peak, discoloured by innumerable cooking fires, to silver at the eaves.
Groups of placid or indifferent men squatted on the verandahs without motion save for the occasional act of taking snuff. The only sound came from a woman who knelt and pounded millet. The smooth wooden block raised with her two hands beat rhythmically in the worn mortar.
A group of naked babies splashed among wavelets too tiny to disturb even their slight equilibrium.