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 MDCCCLIII

I knew was there,—a woman. . . . Heat, motionless and ponderous, as in some feverish colonial city rising from the venomous swamps of the Ivory Coast. The sky-blue seemed to bleach from the horizon's furnace edges,—even sounds were muffled and blunted by the heaviness of that air,—vaguely, as to a dozing brain, came the passing reverberation of footsteps;—the river-current was noiseless and thick and lazy, like wax-made fluid. . . . Such were the days,—and each day offered up a triple hecatomb to death,—and the faces of all the dead were yellow as flame. . ..

Never a drop of rain:—the thin clouds which made themselves visible of evenings only, flocking about the dying fires of the west, seemed to dwellers in the city troops of ghosts departing with the day, as in the fantastic myths of the South Pacific.

. . . I passed the outer iron gate,—the warm sea-shells strewing the way broke under my feet with faint saline odors in the hot air: