Title: The Rake's Progress
Author: Paul Cameron Brown
Release date: March 5, 2010 [eBook #31515]
Language: English
I borrow De Quincey's Confessions of an Opium Eater, the aforementioned an account of that singular Oriental vice, whereupon misplacing the volume in transit from the checkpoint, I attempt to capsulize the book's misadventures only to suffer taciturnity on the part of the staff until, the duplicity of a continued numbers game in Chinese wearing thin and with lassitude similar to the opium habit, the Chief Librarian, a girl herself of Eastern domesticity greets my queries with hushed tones and solemnity akin to a leering Siamese or bedridden Cheshire cat.
[7]
If the rich are different they show it with the clarity of their table as Fitzgerald decried, the breathless hush of their garden regalias, the manner in which wedgewood crystal are cleaned to a polished exactness-- the shimmer of expensive china no less repetitive than the hulking boys waiting in window stops, monsoon rain pelting the upper Punjab plains.
[8]
Sleep is a striking woman accosted by various men while in a dance; the warring desires thus present themselves as on a battlefield-- hunger comes arrayed with red plumes to befit his appetites, sensuality somewhat decked out as a dandy in a mauve waistcoat and, of course, there is Fear, the most thwarted of the suitors, bejewelled with a flashing sabre, rattling it from the tail of his skinny stick horse, the pale charger riding to intercept the beautiful courtesan Sleep bestowing her favours illicitly wherein she would but choose.
[9]
Chess pieces resting upon the jade mantle piece see sampans move quietly thru warm night, rich bundles of bougainvillea crowd market squares where deck chairs extend to the Persian Gulf. Leisured gentlemen finger walking canes, hold eyelids thick as goblets, sharp tridents beside private lairs. Skin in puffy whiteness bulges under lamp's white glare, becomes copra gathered miles from Pondicherry, sesame oil in rotting casks. And the Indian heat, closing with certitude akin to the trance of the snake charmer, holds his flute poised with the Bengali lancer riding a slow crop over the prostrate polo ball.
[10]
How do you survive in the mangrove swamps-- amid the twitchings of foetid water & lice thick as baby tears? How, with all the wallow of thick muck making suction noises and the teams in relays searching nightly with baited hounds, do you pull free? Your bamboo pole knows every ploy but a slender craft ill-equipped to sparring blows from every quarter the undergrowth necessitates. The closeness of the clammy night heaved about like so much rotting fruit will draw the ants ... devouring like that abundance of cold yellow eye-- the firefly swarms that mock your heavy steel machete arm. Across the drift of darkness and the insect life you bat in swarms, the ultimate danger is not in the cayman giant or his reptilian cousin named of copper wire, the anaconda, or even mindless holes, thick black ooze that throttles a victim ... but two legged form coming, searching ... a spectre on hind quarters with a bolo knife stepping free of that beaded circle, the inner camp.
[11]
The End