XXXIV
Anamalis fobil! All the big, milky buds on the baobabs had burst into tender leaf....
And Jean felt this negro spring-time burning in his blood, flowing like a consuming poison through his veins....
He was exhausted by all this renewal of life, because it was a life in which he had no part. The blood that boiled in men’s veins was black; the sap that rose in the plants was poisonous; the perfume of the flowers was dangerous, and the insects were swollen with venom.
In him, too, the sap was rising, the sap of his two-and-twenty years, but with a feverishness that exhausted the source from which it sprang, and in the end this terrible renascence would have brought him to the verge of death.
Anamalis fobil! How rapidly this spring advanced!... June was scarcely over, and already, under the influence of deadly heat, in an atmosphere no longer endurable, the leaves were turning yellow, the plants were dying, and the sere grasses drooped earthwards....