bauch themselves furiously in the opium-smoking dens. An intoxicating flower, spices, poisons and the odorous atmosphere whip them and pack them off headlong to an exquisite voluptuousness followed by stupor and remorse …
Child-like and mystic souls, tasting the pleasure only when accompanied by an undercurrent of intimacy and fervor, they associate with their loves the fresh, steady, set breezes of northern seas, the lenifying temperatures of occidental shores, the virile gusts, even the crabbed cordiality of the squalls, the sharp shifting of the wind after the enervating caress of the trade-winds; the tender smile of the north, the friendly curtains of clouds drawn over the implacable glare, and the almost lustral kiss of the first fog …
In return, they reproached themselves for their commerce with pagan women as if it had been a sacreligious rite.
And they never looked back upon these crimes without there also rising up before them the nightmare of the anguish of typhoons and cyclones during which the occult priestesses of Siva, with the winding and the blowing of trumpets, seemed to pump boiling oil from the sea, only to substitute for it the tellurian lava and the fusing metals of the firmament …
