III
On the ground floor dwelt a horrible old negress called Coura n’diaye, once the favourite of a great negro monarch. There she had her collection of grotesque tatters, her little slave girls, decked with beads of blue glass, her goats, her big-horned sheep, her half-starved, yellow curs.
In the upper storey there was a large, lofty room, square in shape, to which an outside staircase of worm-eaten wood gave access.