The Crater

Synopsis

Every one knows that good fellow, Brown, who gets through a case of whisky a week on his one-man station; and that decent chap, Smith, who is living with a brace of black women somewhere at the back of beyond; while White's temper has become so ungovernable that no wonder his wife ran away from the farm; and, of course, no one believes that Black's shooting accident was accidental.

Many explanations are given. Medicine, physiology, geography, psychology, all make their guess. Superstition too, for if you are living far away in the great silence of Africa, the silence that is woven out of a million minute or distant sounds, it is not difficult to ascribe power over protesting man to insentient things (if insentient they be); to see the innumerable trees, the unexplored swamps, the fantastic rocks as gods or devils, older and crueller than Jah or Moloch, inexorably shaping the lives of the foredoomed mortals who have invaded their sanctuaries."

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