BENEATH TROPIC SEAS 



Now he builds him a house and although it is 

 founded upon or rather in the sand, yet for him 

 henceforth, the stars revolve about the entrance 

 to his burrow, the sun shines only upon it, the tide 

 rises merely for the purpose periodically of dampen- 

 ing it. Then one day I appear — a most unimport- 

 ant shapeless intrusion — harmless and disregarded 

 if I am quiet, something to be avoided if I 

 move. 



I can take no conceit for this, for all his cosmos 

 is divided into two parts, — things harmless, and 

 things unknown and therefore probably harmful. 

 First are the darkness and the sunshine, the wind, 

 the rain, the rising tide, and all quiescent things. 

 A heron — ^a hungry carcinophagous (look it up, it's 

 a good forthright sounding word) heron — ^who has 

 the patience to imitate the immobility of his like- 

 ness on a Japanese screen, — such a heron is but a 

 spindling bush, or is not at all, to the fiddler peering 

 out of his burrow. But if the bulging eyes of the 

 heron so much as wink, if the smallest muscle 

 gives an anticipatory twitch, the spindling bush 

 becomes what it is, — a cancrivorous (you may like 

 this one better, if your forebears came from Rome 

 instead of Athens) horror. It may then stand 

 still till doomsday, and the crab will remain in his 

 burrow until a few minutes after that time. 



Immediately the morning sun has boomed down 

 the Valley of the Cul-de-Sac and set fire to Port- 

 au-Prince and the waters of the great gulf, my 

 fiddler peers out from behind his plug of earth — 



62 



