Think, think. Because then you found yourself outside the township on the beach. When it was night still you knew of the black depths which cannot be plumbed above the light-sphere of fog-banks, salt-layers, grey streets and decrepit structures. Beyond the settlement it is day however, the darkness becoming light but remaining as far and as deep as ever, and everything just as grey. You are with Ganesh, he with his bleached blue jeans and towel over the shoulder. The beach is all pebble: grey and wet and round. You considered the thought that weird animals may, with the rhythm of the dead moon, have crawled from the sea — fools conditioned by their own procreative instincts — to stupidly come and lay these millions of stillborn stone-eggs. You can hear the sea lapping and flowing against the pebbles — these are only a few metres away but with the pale haze on water and land you cannot see it. You walk along the coastline. After some time you meet on the beach an Indian family who come strolling from the opposite direction. Not a complete family though, just a young girl and her two small brothers. The girl has a small figure and is very white in the face. Her hair is straight and black and her arms and legs covered with little black hairs. Ganesh (with his deep dark voice) and the girl tie a twittering conversation and start walking ahead of the others. She has swinging from the one hand an imitation leather handbag. The two little Hindus stay behind with you. It seems that they are wearing their best going-out outfits: dark blazers and shorts, shirts and black ties. With huge dark eyes they look at you. Their eyes are like oily tie knots. Some little distance further you arrive at a name board, fixed with stones around the base, standing practically in the water. On the board big letters, black originally, but now weathered to grey, probably indicate the name of this place: PASS PORT. (Spergebiet.) Grey trails of fog are adrift all over and there is an intense luminosity, a glistening faintness refracted from stone and mistiness and water surface. The light stabs at your eyes and you now regret that your sunglasses remained in your rucksack, perhaps even in another country’s hotel’s hotel room’s bedside cabinet’s second drawer from the bottom. At this place there are all around you, in the sea itself, the ruins of houses. From the beach dykes of stones were built, paths leading to the houses; there are also little ponds or dams, maybe used by earlier inhabitants of long ago as vivaria for fish. All grey now, and probably since long fallen into disuse. You and the two little Indians wish to go swimming and you wade into the grey water — which immediately becomes deep. The coast is treacherous. Therefore you decide not to risk it any farther from the side and you shout warnings at the two boys. With quite a lot of difficulty you scramble over the rolling and shifting stones up the bank again. Even though there is no direct sunshine you are rapidly dry. Your body is rough from the salt and it itches terribly. When you lay your hands on the shoulders of the two boys — they entered the water just like that, fully clothed — you feel the rustle under your fingertips of the salty film now causing white blotches on the dark material. They are all fidgety in their clothes. You wish to take their minds off their bodily discomfort and because they are inquisitive also you decide to try reaching one of the houses all along the ridge of a stone dyke. But close up you notice turtles and iguanas in the ooze of the pools, and still others lying motionless in the silver flickering on the banks. Finally you find a path of stacked stones which is not occupied and you walk out to a dwelling fallen in disrepair, about twenty-five yards from the edge, with the two black-eyed brothers hard on your heels. .
You opened that white-painted front door and entered a room where, so it seemed, thousands upon thousands of moths were fluttering; as living, caressing, abstract, hairy snowflakes were the wingbeats against your face and bare hands. You advance the hands before, pale as faces, and immediately they are covered by countless little wings. How the hands are shuddering! A light bulb was burning in the room and there were pieces of furniture which didn’t look mouldy at all although the floor was at least heel-deep under water. You couldn’t detect any switch for the lamp. The moths did not in the least attempt escaping through the open door. When your eyes became used to the gloom, you started deciphering with much effort the inscriptions and bits of writing and graffiti on the walls. Most were German words. In Gothic script. There was, inter alia, the fable, reduced to a minimum of words, of the man who had a green parrot chained to him, of how he had intercourse with the parrot, of how it is the bird’s ambition to one day hijack an aeroplane. . After a while you closed the door of the ruined house behind you and walked back to the beach, away from the room of prayers. Down the beach you saw Ganesh and the girl returning, all along the nibbling of the water. Despite the fact that they weren’t touching one another you surmised instinctively that, in the short period they were absent together, a “relationship” had sprung up between them. When they came nearer to where you waited — her sari was draped in an enticing way and stuck to the body to emphasize the meagre curves — she looked at Ganesh with roguish eyes and then — so fast and so small and so intimate was the movement that you had to put your memory to it in order to see it — she wrote a little line over his thigh with one red thumbnail. Then you did understand it all? And now.