raw savagery of an African wilderness vibrates in all three of his books. The contrast is an obvious principle of composition in "Ebony and Ivory." It is an even more intimate and pervasive element of his consciousness throughout "Black Laughter." Perhaps the reader will feel its potency most amazingly if he turns from reading "Skin for Skin" to "Black Laughter."
"Skin for Skin" ends, I ascertained by reference, with another attack of "spitting rubies," and with a picture of an invalid who, after having recklessly courted disaster, lies on his back, "perfectly motionless, like a rabbit that 'freezes' in a thicket of thorns, in the hope that he will not be seen, in the hope that the danger will pass him by." But what I remember, without reference, in this book is a fragrant gorse bush at the top of an English lane and a young man there, intent on the "murmuring rapture" of a honey-bee buzzing among the golden bloom.
From that one turns, in "Black Laughter," to darkness and wind and flying sparks from a little Uganda train which at midnight dumps this lonely fugitive at a station on a plateau of East Africa. He crawls exhausted into a rusty bed in a match-board shanty roofed with sheets of corrugated iron, leaving the door open so that he may look through its ebony-black aperture into the cavernous blackness of Africa. He is too much excited for slumber, visioning no longer the honeysuckle lanes and dreaming orchards of his childhood, but dark immensities of wilderness peopled by "naked black men, asleep at the moment by the white ashes of myriads of campfires with their tall spears ready to hand." When at length he dozes off, uneasily, filled with "ancestral misgivings," it is to
