Chapter 36 Some Beasts

It was the twilight of the iguana: From a rainbow battle, a tongue like a javelin lunging in verdure; an ant heap treading the jungle, monastic, on musical feet; the guanaco, oxygen-fine in the high places swarthed with distances, cobbling his feet into gold; the llama of scrupulous eyes the widens his gaze on the dews of a delicate world. A monkey is weaving a thread of insatiable luster on the margins of morning: he topples a pollen-fall, startles the violet-flght of the butterfly, wings on the Muzo. It was the night of the alligator: snouts moving out of the slime,

in original darkness, the pullulations, a clatter of armour, opaque in the sleep of the bog, turning back to the chalk of the sources. The jaguar touches the leaves with his phosphorous absence, the puma speeds to his covert in the blaze of his hungers, his eyeballs, a jungle of alcohol, burn in his head.