Daylight vanishes in six minutes flat, leaving only a faint violet smear marking the western sky. Stars flash out one after the other. In the swamp, frogs have begun making a great noise, which steadily grows louder, an incessant chorus of croaking, gulping and barking sounds working up periodically to a climax, when it is called to order by the punctuation point of a startlingly deep, gruff, batrachian boom, louder than all the rest, after which the cycle builds up again.
The moon has not yet risen. Only a faint ghostly sheen of starlight hovers over the marsh. The house is to be heard rather than seen, its timbers emitting cracks like pistol shots as the air cools and the faulty structure contracts and subsides. A thin penciling of horizontal light-lines marks the position of windows. Two, longer than the others, open on to the flat roof of the porch, and through these a young girl emerges, advancing towards the rails — they cut her off at the knee seen from below, as she leans upon them. The light from inside the house isn’t bright enough to show the colour of her dress, which is probably white.
She raises both hands and lifts her hair for a moment to cool her neck, then lets it fall and again leans on the rail. She is quite motionless, leaning forward slightly as if trying to see something on the ground below; which is impossible, the darkness being impenetrable down there. Her hair, no darker than her dress, hangs almost shoulder length in a long, childish bob, unskillfully imitating the style known as ‘page boy’.
The racket the frogs are making doesn’t drown the exasperating cry of the brain-fever bird, which has crept right into her head. Divorced from its cause, this lingering irritation is able to attach itself to anything in the dark, where nothing is distinguishable from anything else. She associates it in turn with the heat, the frogs, and then with the jingle and flickering gleam which would be the sole evidence of a passing bullock cart, if the driver did not keep up a loud chanting to protect himself from the demons of the swamp.
The girl never moves an inch; does not look round when a dignified barefooted servant, with a white turban and a grey beard, comes to the window behind her. She hears him, but gives no sign. And he, having watched her inscrutably for a while, withdraws in silence, glancing back disapprovingly from her to the open windows, through which clouds of mosquitoes and other insects are streaming continuously, attracted by the light inside.
Around the bare electric bulb, which the white saucer-shaped shade does not hide, they circle in ever-increasing density, almost obscuring its light. Their numbers make them unrecognizable in flight, as they are in death, and their scorched, charred, singed, or still spasmodically twitching bodies pile up on the tabletop and finally overflow on to the bare unpolished floorboards beneath. Here they are hidden by the table’s circular shadow, though a few feebly and lopsidedly drag their maimed legs, fire-shriveled wings, and broken antennae some inches further, before they finally twist into lifeless shreds of detritus.