he said. “It is soft, and natural to me, it is my medium, especially when you are here. But in Africa it seems massive and fluid with terror — not fear of anything — just fear. One breathes it, like the smell of blood. The blacks know it. They worship it, really, the darkness.

One almost likes it — the fear — something sensual.”

She thrilled again to him. He was to her a voice out of the darkness. He talked to her all the while, in low tones, about Africa, conveying something strange and sensual to her: the negro, with his loose, soft passion that could envelop one like a bath. Gradually he transferred to her the hot, fecund darkness that possessed his own blood. He was strangely secret. The whole world must be abolished. He maddened her with his soft,