“Been away quite a time, hasn’t she?” the other asked mildly, leaning forward so that he could see, more clearly, the Consul’s bungalow. “Your brother still here?” “Brother? Oh, you mean Hugh … No, he’s in Mexico City.” “I think you’ll find he’s got back.” The Consul now glanced up at the house himself. “Hicket,” he said briefly, apprehensively. “I

Ixtaccihuatl and Popocatepetl, that image of the perfect marriage, lay now clear and beautiful on the horizon under an almost pure morning sky. Far above him a few white clouds were racing windily after a pale gibbous moon. Drink all morning, they said to him, drink all day. This is life! Enormously high too, he noted some vultures waiting, more

“What’s the use of escaping,” he drew the moral with complete seriousness, “from ourselves?

But behind the volcanoes themselves he saw now that storm clouds were gathering. “Sokotra,” he thought, “my mysterious island in the Arabian Sea, where the frankincense and myrrh used to come from, and no one has ever been—” There was something in the wild strength of this landscape, once a battlefield, that seemed to be shouting at him, a presence

“Hi there, Hugh, you old snake in the grass!”

“What is it Goethe says about the horse?” he said. “‘Weary of liberty he suffered himself to be saddled and bridled, and was ridden to death for his pains.

The woods will be wet. And occasionally a tree will come crashing down. And sometimes there will be a fog and that fog will freeze. Then your whole forest will become a crystal forest. The ice crystals on the twigs will grow like leaves. Then pretty soon you’ll be seeing the jack-in-the-pulpits and then it will be spring.

Nothing in the world was more terrible than an empty bottle! Unless it was an empty glass.

High overhead sailed white sculpturings of clouds, like billowing concepts in the brain of Michelangelo.