Yet, Lee observed, the whitest were,
essentially, black. What amazed, disturbed, him was their indolent
blinking indifference, their indecent imperviousness, in the full blaze
of day.
They were, to Lee, significant, because from them he drew a knowledge
of Cobra. He could not, without such assistance, have arrived at the
instinctive understanding that interpreted the street into which he
turned. It was the street of a delirium, running, perhaps, for half a
mile; an irregular deeply rutted way formed by its double row of small
unsubstantial buildings of raw or gaudily painted boards and galvanized
sheet iron. They were all completely open at the front, with their
remarkable contents, pandemoniums of merchandise, exposed upon a
precarious sidewalk of uneven parallel boards elevated two or three
feet above the road. Mostly caf?s, restaurants, there was still an
incredible number of banks--mere shells with flat tarred roofs and high
counters built from wall to wall. The receivers, the paying tellers,
were many, with the mingled bloods, the heterogeneous characteristics,
of China and Colonial Spain and Africa; and, back of their activity--
there was a constant rush of deposited money and semi-confidential
discussion--were safes so ponderous and ancient that they might have
contained the treasure of a plate fleet of Peru.
Crowding in on them, challenging each other from opposite sides, the
restaurants were longer and shallow, with their groups of tables ranged
against walls decorated in appallingly primitive and savage designs:
palms like crawling spiders of verdigris set on columns of chocolate
rose from shores, from seas, of liquid bright muds in which grotesque
caricatures of men, barbarously clad or, swollen headed, in travesties
of civilized garb, faced women with exaggerated and obscene anatomies.
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