This must be not unlike, he told himself, what some insane person suffers at those moments when, sitting benignly in the asylum grounds, madness suddenly ceases to be a refuge and becomes incarnate in the shattering sky and all his surroundings in the presence of which reason, already struck dumb, can only bow the head. Does the madman find solace

“Get this straight, Geoffrey, I’m thinking of Yvonne, not you.” “Get it a little straighter still. You’re thinking of yourself.

Ah, a woman could not know the perils, the complications, yes, the importance of a drunkard’s life!

the Consul, sucking a lemon, felt the fire of the tequila run down his spine like lightning striking a tree which thereupon, miraculously, blossoms.

“The act of a madman or a drunkard, old bean,” he said, “or of a man labouring under violent excitement seems less free and more inevitable to the one who knows the mental condition of the man who performed the action, and more free and less inevitable to the one who does not know it.

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

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 gr

The prison was now behind them and he imagined themselves jogging into enormous focus for the inquisitive binoculars up there on the watchtower; “Guapa,” one policeman would say. “Ah, muy hermosa,” another might call, delighted with Yvonne and smacking his lips. The world was always within the binoculars of the police.

katzenjammer?”