Cirrus@Austlit

Epigraph: It was a white man, though there was no way you could have known it from his look. He had the mangy, half-starved look of a black, and when, with a cry, he lost his grip on the rail and came tumbling at their feet, the smell of one too, like dead swamp-water; and must have been astonished as they were by the words that had jumped out of his mouth because he could find no more of them. (David Malouf, Remembering Babylon)